It’s no secret that our food system is, in many ways, broken. One symptom of that brokenness is the massive scale of food waste we see in the United States and across the world. In the U.S. alone, we waste 92 billion pounds of food every year, according to Feeding America, which amounts to around 145 billion meals. Considering that more than 44 million people in the United States face regular hunger (including one in five children), that kind of food waste is a tragedy—there are people suffering from empty stomachs while decent food rots before it’s consumed.
When we think of food waste, though, our minds might first go to the bag of wilting spinach in the back of our fridge or the piles of produce that end up in dumpsters behind huge suburban grocery stores. This type of food waste definitely accounts for a large portion of the good food that goes uneaten, but it’s not the only place along the supply chain that food goes to waste. In fact, 21% food waste actually occurs on farms themselves, before the food ever even reaches the market.
Why is this food wasted, you ask? Most of the time, it comes down to cosmetic issues. Farms often can’t sell produce that doesn’t look picture-perfect sitting on a grocery store shelf. Generally, it would cost more to process this produce than it’s actually worth, so farmers will often leave this food in the ground, not even bothering to pick it.
That’s where gleaning comes in. Gleaning is the act of harvesting extra food from farms to provide hungry and food-insecure people with something to eat. The practice has a long history in different parts of the world; it was even mentioned in the Bible as a way for productive, land-owning people to give back to the poorer members of their communities.