From Lisa Ousley: At After the Harvest, we glean-plain and simple. But maybe not so simple if you’re not familiar with what gleaning means and why we do it.
Gleaning is the act of gathering food left after a field, orchard or vineyard has been harvested.
Take, for example, a field of sweet corn. Did you know that when a farmer grows sweet corn for selling at the market, he only harvests the top ear of corn from the stalk? Why, you ask? Because the top ear of corn gets all the rain, all the sunshine, all the good things that help make that ear of corn the biggest, juiciest ear on the stalk. Every stalk of sweet corn has two to four ears. What do you think happens to the rest of the ears of corn on each stalk? Well, most of the time, after the farmer has picked all the second ears his family can eat, he might feed the rest to his cows and pigs, or he might just chop it all up and turn it under so that it goes back into the earth and enriches the soil.
The thing is, the smaller ears of corn on the stalk are perfectly good to eat-they’re just smaller and American consumers want the biggest, juiciest ears of sweet corn for their money. So the little ones just don’t sell. And if they won’t sell, the farmer doesn’t want to waste his time picking them. That’s where gleaners come in. After the Harvest is a hunger-relief organization that works to get those smaller ears of sweet corn, the smaller apples, you name it. There’s all sorts of reasons why fruits and vegetables get passed up or graded out. For instance, a green pepper with two bumps on the bottom rather than three bumps is graded out.
There’s a whole lot of food that is graded out in the field, where we send gleaners to pick. And there’s a whole lot of food graded out in packing sheds, as well. We work to get that wonderful food into the hands and bellies of people in Missouri and Kansas who don’t have enough to eat.
The fact is that 374,660 people – that’s one in seven people in our 26-county region – is “food insecure.” That means at some time during the month, they run out of money to buy food and may not know when or how they’re going to get their next meal. And about one-third of those people are children under the age of 18. Plain and simple-that’s why we glean.
