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Have
you ever heard the term gleaning
| Gleaning
: Literally meaning, "to collect
grain by leapers", gleaning has come to
be known as the collective redistribution
of food, especially potentially wasted food. |
? If
you have not, odds are you've participated in
it. Give up? Gleaning is technically defined as
"to collect grain left by reapers",
but has come to be known as the process of redistributing
food that could potentially be wasted. If your
local sub shop donates unused bread to homeless
shelters or a produce wholesaler donates produce
deemed "unsellable" to the local food
bank or you drop dry goods into the Toys for Tots
drive at your local school,you can call yourself
a gleaner. Whether you call it gleaning, food
rescue, or food |
recovery, they
are all part of the community of individuals who work
from day to day to make sure good food goes to the
dinner table instead of going to waste.
In the United
States, we not only produce an abundance of food,
we waste an enormous amount of it as well. Up to one-fifth
of America's food goes to waste - in fields, commercial
and household kitchens, markets, schools, and restaurants
(USDA).
Gleaning follows
a basic humanitarian ethic that has been part of societies
for centuries. We know that "gleaning,"
or gathering after the harvest, goes back at least
as far as biblical days. Today, however, the terms
"gleaning" and "food recovery"
cover a variety of different efforts. The four most
common methods are:
1. Field Gleaning: The collection of crops from farmers'
fields that have already been mechanically harvested
or on fields where it is not economically profitable
to harvest.
2. Perishable Food Rescue or Salvage: The collection
of perishable produce from wholesale and retail sources.
3. Food Rescue: The collection of prepared foods from
the food service industry.
4. Nonperishable Food Collection: The collection of
processed foods with long shelf lives.
Hunger in America
is simply unacceptable. A study by the Community Childhood
Hunger Identification Project reports that most low-income
families must receive food assistance from several
sources, relying on Federal food assistance programs
as well as emergency food programs. For example, 90%
of low-income households with at least one child under
the age of 12 use food pantries and soup kitchens
and also participate in the School Lunch Program.
Even with Federal assistance and the work of charities
and nonprofit organizations, last year nearly 20%
of the requests for emergency food assistance went
unmet. 20%!! Gleaning or "food recovery"
is one creative way to help reduce hunger in America.
It supplements Federal food assistance programs by
making better use of a food source that already exists.
As has been stated, up to one-fifth of America's food
goes to waste each year. That's an estimated 130 pounds
of food per person ending up in landfills every year.
The annual value of this lost food is estimated at
around $31billion. But the real story is that those
lost resources could have fed 49 million people (USDA)!
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