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Sandra first brought Agnes Varda's film The Gleaners and I (Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse) to our attention and, in some important ways, inspired the Gleaning Stories project. Sandra and her younger sister are avid gleaners now. When I asked Sandra how she became a gleaner, she began talking about her mother, who grew up in Germany during the period of post-WWII scarcity. Sandra was born in Germany, then the family moved to Japan when she was 5, and to New York when she was 9. Her mother gleaned on all three continents, sometimes embarrassing her daughters as she inquired of neighbors and even strangers if they could glean their orchards, fields, or gardens. Her mother was committed to avoiding waste and not letting opportunities to grow or collect food slip past. The first part of our conversation traces Sandra's mother's odyssey from casual backyard and roadside gleaning to impassioned, almost obsessive, gleaning of commercial agricultural fields in Switzerland where she moved later in her life to take care of her own mother. The remaining parts trace Sandra's own path from reluctant childhood gleaner to impassioned adult gleaner, community gardener, and dumpster diver.
Listen to Sandra's stories
Another morning of iceberg lettuce, this time just north of Salinas in fields owned by Martin Jefferson & Sons. And real gleaning. The commercial harvesters (some of whom we could see in the field next to ours) had been through this field awhile ago, so it took some real dedication and lots of back-bending and lifting to find fresh heads in a sea of harvest remains. Lots of brown leaves to strip, and we had to be careful to check the cores for rot. But we managed to glean over 8000 pounds of lettuce for the food banks and found plenty to take home ourselves. As always, by glean's end we'd only made a small dent in what was there for the taking. The differences between us gleaners and the commercial farmworkers working in the field next to ours were stark. They worked apace, keeping up with the tractor-pulled conveyor belt that dumped the heads in cardboard bin after bin on the flatbed right there in the field. In contrast, we filled our plastic crates and carried them a couple of minutes' walk to a pickup truck that shuttled our lettuce the two hundred yards or so back to where others of us lifted and dumped our crates into bins in the Ag Against Hunger semi. The camaraderie was great and spirits were high. Church groups from as far away as Burlingame, international students from the Monterey Institute, and nursery workers from Driscoll's Strawberries swelled our numbers, but it still took until noon to fill 12 bins. Good hard work on a sunny day, and worth the effort, but there were some tired looking folks headed back to their cars when we'd finished.
Listen to stories from the August 8th glean
