About four years ago, I read a story about people in California called “gleaners” who would go to the farmers market and pick up extras—“seconds,” as I knew them from my high school summers working at a farmstand—to donate to soup kitchens and the like. The idea struck me as ingenious. That someone would take the time to pick up something that one person didn’t want and deliver it someone who did want it was so simple but so groundbreaking.
How cool it was, then, when I discovered that there was also a group of “gleaners” right here in Lexington. So I signed up.
What we do at GleanKY isn’t rocket science. We show up at point A, pick up the food, deliver it to point B, and call it a day. Anyone can do it, it doesn’t require a huge time commitment, and it’s fun. When you’re out gleaning—talking to farmers, enjoying the weather, looking at all the beautiful food—it’s easy to overlook how important this service we offer really is. We know that we’re preventing the food from being wasted and feeding someone in need, but as the “delivery service” of sorts between people who grow the food and the people who feed the hungry, we don’t always get to see how what we do impacts the person who eats the gleaned food.
In fact, it wasn’t it wasn’t until this year, during one of my last gleaning trips, in my fourth season of gleaning, that I really understood the difference gleaning makes in a human being’s life.
I was driving the GleanKY van—the one we affectionately call “Great White”—to the Sunday farmer’s market. I was in that mode where I wanted to forget all responsibilities and indulge in what I had left of the weekend. So when I met the gleaning crew at the market, we got to business and made efficient use of our time. In less than an hour, we gleaned over 271 pounds of end-of-season tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and squash—not a bad amount considering the farming season was beginning to wind down.
The delivery that day went to our friends at Embrace church on N. Limestone St. and the neighboring trailer park. I was sitting in the van at the church after our drop-off, tallying up our produce totals, when a man pushing a cart full of cans down the street, asked me if I had any change. His name was Jerry.
The prior night had been cruel to Jerry, as the fresh scar on his face had proven, and all he wanted was a cup of coffee to warm him up. Well, I didn’t have change, I told him, but I knew where I could get him some fresh food. Could I put him together a bag of vegetables? He told me he’d really appreciate it.
We walked back over to the church, where we assembled a bag of some bread, greens, celery, tomatoes and peppers, which had all been picked up from the farmers market less than an hour prior. And then I listened.
I listened to Jerry reminisce about how the celery reminded him of what his grandma used to grow. I listened to him admit to making bad—often violent—choices in his life. I listened to his remorse over not seeing his family in over a decade. I listened to his desire to turn his life around. I listened to the sadness in his voice as he recounted how people treat him, a homeless person living on the streets. And I listened to him cry about the pain he experiences, both physically and emotionally.
In all honesty, I can’t relate to someone like Jerry. I’ve never lived on the street or gotten beat up for no reason or had to ask a stranger for a cup of coffee. I’m no good with small talk, and any words of empathy or advice I could offer this man 20 years older than me would have sounded forced and ungenuine. But sometimes we’re placed in certain situations, and even when it’s not comfortable or natural, we have to offer what we’ve got—in this case, I had a bag a food and an ear to listen.
Until that day, GleanKY for me was as simple as driving food from point A to point B—but it can be so much more. As gleaners, we’re the strings tying together different groups in our community: the farmers, the cooks, people who need a little bit of help, and others who are willing to offer it. If you were to draw lines on a map between all the places where we pick up food and deliver food, it would be a pretty impressive web. But it’s when you zoom in on one of those lines that you see the heart of what it is we do: You find the stories of people, like Jerry, whose lives were made a little bit brighter because some took the time to transport a simple bunch of celery.
This post is written by Board Member and Volunteer, Rachael Brugger.