On Gleaning: The Idea as the Seed of Action

It has taken me quite a while to get around to this, but below is the text of a sermon that I preached last November, just after Thanksgiving, about the problem of food waste and about gleaning. 

This sermon really inspired a few people in the congregation to spread the word and to take action. I'm extraordinarily thrilled to report that the vision I propose near the end of the sermon is already coming to fruition thanks to a team of highly motivated, caring, capable, and dedicated lay-leaders.  (Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!)

I will share more details of their successes soon, but for now, here is the sermon that started us on our way...

“A Hidden Abundance”

© 2009 Rev. Wendy L. Bell
Harvard Unitarian Universalist Church
Harvard, Massachusetts
November 29, 2009

Readings:

Leviticus 19:9-10

And when you reap your land’s harvest, you shall not finish off the edge of your field, nor pick up the gleanings of your harvest. And your vineyard you shall not pluck bare, nor pick up the fallen fruit of your vineyard. For the poor and for the sojourner you shall leave them. I am the Lord your God.

Tosephta Pe’ah 1:6 (rabbinic material supplemental to the mishnah)

Rabbi Simeon said: There are four reasons why the Torah said that pe’ah should be at the end of the field: so that he will not rob the poor, keep the poor waiting, give the wrong impression, cause deception. How (can he) rob the poor? By waiting until no one is around and then telling his relative, “come and take this pe’ah.” Cause the poor to wait? The poor might sit and keep watch on his field all day, thinking, “Now he will set aside pe’ah, now he will set aside pe’ah;” however, if he sets aside the end of his field, the poor man does his work all day and at its end (comes) and takes it. Give the wrong impression? People may pass by his field and say, “See this person has harvested his field and has left no edge for the poor despite the Torah’s injunction, ‘Do not destroy the edge of your field.’” Cause deception? So that they (the field owners) should not say “we have already given” or they will not leave the (part whose crop is) good but only the bad.

Rabbi Moses Alshekh (16th century commentary to Leviticus 19:9)

When we leave part of our fields and vineyards unharvested so that the poor can come and take what they need, we must not feel that we are giving them a gift from our own property. Our harvest is ours only through the grace of God, who expects us to act as His agents to see to it that the poor get what they need. The laws of pe’ah, leket, ‘olelot, and peret are intended to help the poor keep their self-respect. It is far less embarrassing for a poor man to enter an orchard, a field, or a vineyard and take from it without having to ask the owner’s permission than it would be for him to receive grain, fruit, or vegetables from our hands as a gift of charity. We must always remember that whatever we possess is not really ours but God’s.

Sermon:

We who are here today have survived another Thanksgiving. We have managed to eat our fill – or perhaps, more than our fill – of turkey or tofurkey, of potatoes and yams, of squash and stuffing and green bean casserole, with a dab of cranberry sauce on the side, and a slice or two of pie. And I’m sure I’m leaving something out.

For most of us here, Thanksgiving is a holiday of abundance. The food may not be fancy, but it is filling. Each of us, no doubt, has our favorite foods, our traditional dishes, family recipes that have been handed down from previous generations. And on that particular night, around whatever table we find ourselves, most of us have eaten far more than we’ve needed to eat.

Harvest festivals are like that.

Here we are at the end of a 6-month growing season in New England, where the first legendary Thanksgiving meal is said to have taken place, and there is all of this food, picked from the fields, that needs to be dealt with. As is the case with other harvest festivals in other places around the world, part of this bounty must be ‘put away’ – pickled or otherwise preserved and stored to provide nourishment during the upcoming season of scarcity. But a goodly portion of it is prepared and eaten as part of a celebration of abundance and gratitude. Thank God – or thank goodness - this year, we have enough!

I had never before fully experienced this sense of the wild abundance of the harvest until Cathy and I bought a CSA share a few years ago through a local farm. Oh, I’ve been fortunate to always have more than enough food in my life. But what I’d never experienced is the madness – the rush to preserve or consume so much bounty before it goes to waste.

When we started I would come home each week of the summer with bags upon bags of produce, much of which was utterly unfamiliar to me, and all of which probably could have fed us for the entire week had we been willing to eat only vegetables and fruits. But we were not. And so I had to learn about blanching and freezing and saucing and a little bit about fermenting. And I’ve more yet still to learn about canning and pickling and drying.

By the end of the second summer, I felt like I was tentatively beginning to find my rhythm in the midst of all of this abundance. And then came the first winter share pick-up. That just about did me in. It consisted of a couple of large waxed boxes of all manner of tubers and roots and winter squash and greens, and it was intended to last us for at least a month, which it more than did.

We just picked such a mother lode up not two weeks ago…carrots, radishes, turnips, rutabagas, brussel sprouts, broccoli, cauliflower, leeks, bokchoy, collards, swiss chard, fennel, lettuce, spinach, arugula, tatsoi, napa cabbage, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, butternut squash, onions, shallots… That is more or less the inventory.

After two years of this sort of madness, we’ve begun to figure out where the coolest and driest place for storing onions and sweet potatoes and where the darkest, coolest and most humid place is for storing white potatoes, and how to fit 17 bags of produce in the refrigerator in such a way that we can still access milk and yogurt and Dijon mustard.

But ask anyone in my family, and you’ll find that such abundance turns me into a bit of a crazy person, who continuously blathers on about how no one best buy any more food and how all the salad greens must be eaten, even if you can’t pronounce them, and what are we going to do with 20 lbs of carrots anyway, and oh, by the way, this must all be gone by next Saturday when we have to pick up our next batch.

But despite my grandest efforts, some of this bounty inevitably goes to waste. Fortunately, the produce from the farm can be composted when it turns ugly. But other things must sometimes be thrown out.

We are – most of us – among the very lucky when it comes to food. We are among those who can afford to waste it sometimes. And it seems like abundance and waste go hand-in-hand, to some degree. We who have a lot can lose a little here and there without missing it. And you and I are not alone.

I recently read that Americans waste between 40-50% of the food that we have available to consume. One organization puts this at approximately 96 billions lbs. of food.

But here is the paradox. Amidst all of this abundance – so great that we feel we can afford to let some of it go to waste – there are people who go to bed hungry at night.

According to Bread for the World, just over a billion people globally are hungry. That’s approximately one in almost every seven people. Each day, 16,000 children die due to hunger-related causes, which is the equivalent of one child’s life every 5 seconds. In our country alone, over 35 million people live in households that experience hunger or the threat of hunger – more than one in every ten households. That includes over half a million people right here in Massachusetts.

And yet, there is enough food produced globally to provide 4.3 lbs. of food per person each day. And here in this country, the food that we waste would more than feed the almost 40 million individuals who are confronted by hunger. More than enough for all! A true abundance!

Why then do so many people in our world experience a scarcity of food?

The answer to that question is complex and multi-faceted, but part of it has to do with this issue of food waste. When we talk about food waste, we are talking, yes, about that food that individuals and families toss when we clean out our refrigerators and our pantries every couple of weeks. But even more so, we are talking about food that we never even see because it is removed from the food stream before we can get our hands on it.

Some if it is left in fields to rot, or it is plowed under, or it is shipped by the truckloads to landfills due to imperfections. These are the potatoes, the salad greens, and the fruits, for example, which don’t conform to the standards to which most of us are accustomed. They are irregular. They are slightly bruised or blemished. They are misshapen. They are too large or too small. At a single potato farm in France, featured in a documentary called The Gleaners and I, workers harvested 4500 tons of potatoes on a single day and then, of that, dumped 25 tons.

And then there is the produce, which is culled once it makes it to the point of sale. One gentleman named Jonathan Bloom who is working on a book about food waste, once took a job in a supermarket produce department to learn what he could learn. He was told to cull not only the food that had just reached its sell-by date, which is safe to eat for another 7 days, but also any food that he would not buy as a consumer, based simply on appearance. On his very first morning, he threw out 24 pounds of perfectly edible cut fruit. With new food coming in every day, the food on the shelves is rotated off even if it is saleable. Often, it goes right into the dumpster.

So, what of this wasting of food? What are the implications? The way I see it, they are environmental, they are theological, and they are moral.

There is a heavy environmental cost to all this waste. Wendell Berry has said that “how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.” It follows then that if we waste 50% of our food, it is akin to wasting our world. Certainly it amounts to wasting the world’s resources. Think of the energy, water, and land resources that are used to produce, process, package, and transport food. All of that is wasted, too, when we waste food.

And there is the disposal of that waste. If I don’t eat my arugula in time, it will go into my compost pile and become nutritious food for my soil. But what of the food that is thrown away? Decomposing food waste is the single greatest producer of methane in landfills, and methane is a greenhouse gas that is 21 times more potent than CO2. And some have said that if we all stop wasting food that could be eaten, the CO2 impact would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 4 cars off the road. Furthermore, one author suggests a hypothetical scenario in which, if we planted trees on the deforested land currently used to grow food that is wasted, we could theoretically offset between 50-100% of our greenhouse gas emissions.

And then there are the theological implications. Our readings this morning, the passage from Leviticus and the rabbinical commentaries, make clear that in Jewish tradition, the edges of the fields are to be set aside for the poor. They do not belong to the landowner or the farmer. They belong to God who has given them to the hungry. Accordingly, when we throw out food that could be eaten, we are, in effect, stealing from God and from the poor.

There is also the perspective of the 13th century Zen master Dogen, who had the insight, 800 years ago, that the manner in which we treat our food and the manner in which we treat one another are related.

“When you prepare food, never view the ingredients from some commonly held perspective, nor think about them only with your emotions. Maintain an attitude that tries to build great temples from ordinary greens…A person who is influenced by the quality of a thing, or who changes his speech or manner according to the appearance or position of the people he meets, is not a man working in the Way.”

In our modern society, it is not only imperfect, bruised, damaged, aged food that we cast off. In our modern pursuit of perfection, we also tend, as a whole, to cast of people who are aged, bruised, or damaged in some way, emotionally, mentally, or physically. How we choose to treat our food is to some degree a reflection of how we treat other people.

And this relates back to the problem of hunger in a world of plenty, to the paradox of abundance and scarcity with which we began, which is clearly a moral issue. We simply ought to do a better job with the abundance that is ours to take care of our brothers and sisters on this planet.

There are organizations that are tackling that issue head on. One is The Society of St. Andrew, which brings together volunteers to practice modern day gleaning, organizing them to go out into the fields after harvest to gather the imperfect produce and to deliver it to food pantries and programs that feed the hungry.

And there are organizations involved in what is known as food rescue or food recovery, which approach corporations and grocery stores to “glean” the products and produce that they would otherwise throw out, and likewise deliver them to hunger relief agencies.

The Federal Government is on board with these efforts as is the UN, which has backed a call for global food waste to be cut in half by 2025.

As an individual with a refrigerator full of produce and another CSA pick-up next week, what can I do? I can simply be more mindful of where my food comes from and where it goes if don’t eat it. Then I can head home after church and make some so-called “garbage soup” to use up those carrots and rutabagas and potatoes and greens and invite you all over to help me eat it! I can keep trying my best to buy less and to put away more. We can all take those steps.

But what can we do together? What could we do as a community?

Imagine…

What if we were to call 2 or 3…or 10…local farms and see if they might we willing to let us glean in their fields after their harvest?

What if we were to be in touch with some of the local farm stores and a grocery store or two about gleaning their culled produce and products?

What if we were to form our own Harvard UU Glean Team with a simple email notification system – a team that could be activated on short notice to go out into the fields for a few hours – or to pick up some boxes from a store and deliver them to Loaves and Fishes or to WHEAT?

We’ve done something like this before. A few years ago, the Willards gave permission to our Sr. High Youth Group to glean pumpkins, which were turned into delicious pumpkin soup by one of our members and sold to raise money for hunger relief. The Congregational Church is famous for its apple pies. What if we became famous for our Pumpkin Soup and our clear mission to eliminate hunger in our region?

Imagine what a difference that could make…to us as a church and to each of us as individuals…to the clients at Loaves and Fishes and the guests at Community Table…to our children and our families and co-workers and neighbors who would witness our commitment to justice and mercy…our commitment to the poor and to the environment…our commitment to our Universalist values that teach us that no one is to be cast off…not the damaged, not the bruised, not the aged, not the imperfect…not the laborers, or the farmers, or the rural or urban poor, or least of all the hungry of our world.

Such a vision begins with recognizing the hidden abundance that surrounds us – in our fields, in our markets, in our kitchens, in our hearts, in our lives - and with helping others to see it too. It begins with an understanding that all that we see is not actually ours, that it belongs not to us alone, but to all of our sisters and brothers and all of the creatures that inhabit this small planet. It begins with knowing what is enough and taking only our share and no more. It begins with mindfulness, with attention, and with compassion. It begins with us.

So may it be. Amen. And Blessed Be.