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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
A real glean in an organic plum orchard near Castroville. The farm had been in the same family since the late 19th century. We were doing the third pass through this orchard, so pickings were slim. It took sharp eyes and a little luck to find the remaining plums that were ripe but not over-ripe. The ground was dotted with too-ripe plums that had already dropped, and we had to be careful shaking the trees not to bruise the remaining fruit. Still, we gleaned a couple of hundred pounds of wonderful San Jose plums that the food banks and food pantries will be delighted to get. And we got to take plums home. Most of us grabbed bags of slightly over-ripe fruit to slurp immediately or cook into a favorite jam or sauce.
Listen to stories from the July 25th glean
Gleaners with Ag Against Hunger know Ananda as their gleaning coordinator. But fewer folks probably know her history as an organic farmer. She farmed in Oregon, Florida, and New York, and got a first-hand look at the amount of waste on even small farms. She home-schooled her kids, so they spent plenty of time in the fields with her. Her mother's father was a Jewish baker in Massachusetts, and Ananda says she got her entrepreneurial spirit from her grandparents. Her father's family lives in a small town in rural Spain, where sharing is a way of life.
Listen to Ananda's stories
Lupe Rivas is one of the pioneers of bilingual education in Bakersfield. She now lives, teaches, and is politically active in Watsonville.
Rivas grew up in Texas, the oldest of 7 children. Her father was an auto body repairman, while her mother worked as a housekeeper. The family did field work, as well, traveling to Michigan as seasonal laborers. Her stories tell of making dolls of the overgrown cucumbers in the field while her parents worked, of gleaning strawberries, of the move to California and her transition from field work to store work to teaching there, and of her attempts to introduce her children and grandchildren to the experience of field work.
Listen to Lupe Rivas's stories
It was a cold and windy morning for gleaning. We were out in one of the fields of Tanimura and Antle near Salinas. We had the big truck and folks worked fast. Not only was the lettuce easy to get to, it was easy to cut and clean as well. So the bins filled fast and folks carried crate after crate back to the truck.
Lots of good conversation today. I got out my recorder and asked folks to remember back to what a typical breakfast in their childhood had been like: what they ate, when they ate, who they ate with, and where the food had come from. That started lots of reminiscences of family farms and gardens or of shopping with a parent at the local store. One gleaner, who particularly liked leftovers (and particularly left-over vegetables) for breakfast, remembers eating peas while her sister threw her portion of peas around the kitchen. A fair number of gleaners remembered special breakfasts of pie made from local fruits. And lots of the younger folks mentioned favorite boxed cereals.
Folks without jackets or sweaters were shivering by time the truck was full and it was time to get back to our cars. But the shivered goodbyes were warm.
Iceberg: Luther Burbank's revenge on the lettuce-eating world! Actually, when I'm after crunch and not flavor, I like it.
The field today was one of Valley Pride's just south of Salinas. We had more folks than there were knives and crates, so teamwork and division of labor were the order of the day. A mild day, with overcast sky turning sunny as we cut, cleaned, and carried the lettuce heads. With so many working, it wasn't much over an hour and a half after we had all gone into the field before the 16 big bins on the truck were full and we were free to glean lettuce to take home for ourselves.
Today kicked off gleaning for Monterey County high schools. Everett Alvarez HS in Salinas hosted a barbecue after the glean and many students came to complete community service hours, activity credits, or just to do something worthwhile. Other students came from high schools from Watsonville to Monterey. Further afield, Archbishop Mitty HS in San Jose sent 24 students and 4 staff down as part of their 10-day immersion trip in their Ethics, Culture, and Justice class. Groups came from United Methodist Church and other area churches, and lots of families and individuals came to help out.Listen to stories from the June 6th glean
