When Times Get Tough, Martha’s Vineyard residents practice gleaning | The Local Food Report

This week part three of a mini-series on big picture local food issues—today with a focus on what we can change with a little hyper-local creativity. Here are parts one and two.

Last week, I heard that the USDA has slashed funding for two programs that provided more than a billion dollars for schools and food banks to buy local food. Which frankly, is incredibly depressing. But instead of sinking into despair, Noli Taylor — co-executive director of the wildly successful Martha’s Vineyard non-profit Island Grown Initiative or IGI — suggests we try something else.

"Gleaning is it’s an ancient practice, it's talked about in the Bible, where farmers would go through their field and do their harvest and then open the fields — traditionally, it was to the poor to come and harvest what's left."

Perhaps the idea of gleaning sounds outdated — like something that might only happen in biblical times. But on Martha’s Vinyard, when IGI first started thinking about how to get local food into school cafeterias back in 2006, they wondered: what might happen if they tried making this old practice new again?

"Originally, it was really to support cafeterias in utilizing more local food, where volunteers go and harvest excess produce from farms and gardens around the island," Noli explained. "And now that program has become a huge driver for food access improvement — on the island, we harvested about 60,000 pounds of food last year for donation, that’s thanks to our mighty volunteer force and our awesome gleaning manager."

60,000 pounds of food is nothing to sniff at. I did the math, and the average person eats about four pounds of food per day — which means this 60,000 pounds could feed 41 people for a year. To Noli and the volunteers that make the IGI gleaning program work, this is a win on so many levels. For starters, gleaning cuts down right in the field on food waste.

"Today so much food goes uneaten, a huge percentage of the foodthat's grown is never even harvested. And that happens for a whole host of different reasons," Noli said.

On the Vineyard Noli’s heard from farmers who have lost seasonal workers and have no one to help, farmers whose harvest comes in late after the bulk of the island’s summer residents have left so there is no market, and farmers who’ve done succession planting and moved on to the next rows of a crop but still know there’s some food that could be harvested in the rows they’re leaving behind.

"But if at that moment when food is ripe and it's not gonna be harvested, you can bring in volunteers to harvest it to donate to neighbors in need, we can reduce food waste in the system and also support feeding people who need access to fresh food."

IGI isn’t the only organization to remember gleaning. In fact, there’s a network of gleaning programs that’s grown up in recent years all over the United States — but IGI is the only gleaning program on the Cape and Islands. right now, Noli says, would be a great time to see this change and for gleaning to spread into other communities.

Island Grown Initiative

"Many, many people in our community are struggling to make ends meet and to access the food that they need. So we've seen more than a doubling in the number of clients that we have at our Island Food Pantry since 2019. We now serve 5,700 registered clients, which is roughly one in four of our year-round community members. And that's a lot of people for our small community who really need help."

Statewide, one in nine people in Massachusetts receive government food assistance. Gleaning is an ancient way of cutting through barriers and working on the hyper-local level to meet this rising need. I haven’t read the full Bible, but after my conversation with Noli, I found the passage she’d referenced in Leviticus, Chapter 19. “When you reap the harvest of your land,” it instructed, “do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor.” It’s an ancient rule, but still timely.

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Find the gleaning map here.

Find another Local Food Report feature about gleaning here.