Modern Day Gleaning

Usha Thakrar, Executive Director

What does food rescue look like?  I get asked that question a lot.  The picture people have in their heads is an old one - a painting of women bent over harvesting in a field.  And, yes sometimes food rescue is gleaning and looks a lot like that - the clothes may have changed. But modern day gleaning is more complex, involves larger quantities and lots of equipment. Daily, tractor trailer loads of fresh produce are rejected by grocers and distributors - often for minor technical reasons. There is a lot of healthy food that gets thrown away as a result. 

So what does food rescue look like?  It looks like this.

It’s a Friday in December and we get a text at noon - there is full trailer of romaine lettuce that has been rejected - do we want it?  A truck can deliver it that afternoon.  Of course the answer is yes, but what does that mean? Staffing in the winter is thin - especially on Fridays.  The earliest the truck is arriving is 2pm - our goal is to unload the truck, put the lettuce in a cooler and deal with distributing it on Monday. So I recruit one person to stay with me and help.  

The truck arrives 5:30pm.  The good news is that the lettuce is in great shape and all the pallets are the same - that makes counting easy. The bad news is that each pallet is taller than our storage trailers.  Thank goodness for Tim - he is also tall. So for the next hour, I pulled pallets off the trailer and Tim removed the top layer of boxes from each pallet (28 in total) to create new pallets and then we put them away for the weekend. 

Final count - 32 pallets - 49 boxes per pallet, 12 bags per box, 3 romaine hearts per bag.  All of which were in good shape and should feed people. So, the next step is getting it to our partners - who feed people.

Over the weekend the team communicates with partners, coordinates deliveries to make sure that this lettuce reaches people who need it before it is no longer good food. By Wednesday every case has been distributed - 56,448 romaine hearts have landed on the plates of households who struggle to access healthy food.

These days, this is what food rescue looks like.