By Rebecca Fennel, Development Assistant
This Saturday, October 24 will be an especially exiting day for us. We're celebrating Food Day--a national day to take action to solve food-related issues. This year, Food Day's theme is "Toward a Greener Diet," which aligns perfectly with BAG's mission to ensure everyone's access to healthy, fresh, and local food. This year, we're collaborating with the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Resources to expand our distributive reach. With the help of MDAR, Saturday's operations will include a different set of recipient agencies from those who normally receive gleaned produce. These organizations include WIC (Women, Infant, & Children) agencies, Mass in Motion offices, and educational programs across eastern MA:
Because it's an incredibly good year for apples, we'll be distributing over 1,200 pounds of crunchy, tasty ones to the above organizations. We're so glad that MDAR is helping us provide awareness about gleaning to hundreds of new individuals and families on Food Day! This past month has been all about apples! In September alone, we gleaned 40,980 pounds (1046 bushels) of apples. Most of this crop came from two farms, Connemara House Farm, a private family orchard in Topsfield, and Kimball Fruit Farm, a large market farm in Pepperell. Additionally, we added another strong source of apples in Sholan Farms, a community owned and run non-profit farm in Leominster with an incredible community vibe. Other than apples, we gleaned 35 other varieties of crops in September, second to apples being corn (12,090 pounds from Brigham Farm, Kimball Fruit Farm, and Dennis Busa Farm), and third being watermelon (2,978 pounds from Appleton Farms and The Food Project-Lincoln). This was the most melon we have ever gleaned (with an additional 1500 pounds gleaned in early October!). Specifically at The Food Project, they had harvested all they wanted from the field for their CSA members, and before they plowed it all under, they gave us a call to go out glean it for donation. We also began working with WCI (Work Community Independence) Waltham, a private non-profit agency providing homes, employment and day supports to people with a wide range of intellectual and developmental disabilities; a few individuals from the organization helped us glean watermelon at The Food Project. Looking forward to October, we hope to get all of the peppers, eggplants, and other frost sensitive crops we can before it gets too cold. And, of course, we will continue to glean as many apples as our volunteers can pick! To the Harvest! Matt Crawford Lead Gleaning Coordinator Emma Arnesty-Good loves to eat vegetables, and as a by-product likes to be around most produce. She's starting her senior year at Tufts this fall as an American Studies major. She likes to talk about institutions and power in the United States--something she thinks is quite relevant to the current state of food access. As someone who's had a complicated relationship with where she wants to be (she grew up in the heart of San Francisco, but spends most of her time on rivers as a river guide/kayaker), she finds the border between Boston's foodshed and the dense population of the city a comforting combination. Emma first learned of gleaning in an environmental English class that Duck came to visit last fall. Emma asked a lot of questions, which turned into one: "Can I intern for BAG?" It turns out that being bothersome gets you some places. Emma is proving a very helpful intern thus far, lending a hand in the fields on weekends and doing some research projects, which include farm and agency mapping, as well as a food distribution analysis. She is very excited to be part of the team, and we are so glad to have her! |
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