Sharing the bounty

<p>Melita Love, in a heavy vest and warming her hands around a cup of coffee, stands outside the Flying Goat coffeehouse a block off the Healdsburg Plaza, eyeing the street as she awaits the arrival of her picking crew.</p><p>An aluminum ladder is tied to the top of her SUV and the cargo hold is filled with empty vegetable crates. By 9:15 a.m., her trio has assembled and made its way to an orchard among the vineyards off Westside Road where they will don garden gloves and quietly glean figs and persimmons in the crisp autumn air.</p><p>These three middle-aged women, none with any farming roots, are engaging in what is often called the second harvest. As holiday canned food drives get under way, there is a small but growing movement of volunteers along the North Coast who are gleaning for the needy closer to the source.</p><p>From Petaluma to Willits, motivated by both the worsening economy and a rising consciousness about the value of eating fresh, locally grown produce, gleaners are taking what is left from small farms, neglected orchards and back yards so good food doesn't go to waste.</p><p>It's an ancient practice famously portrayed by 19th century painter Jean-Francois Millet, whose depiction of three poor women humbly picking the leftover wheat from a harvested field shocked the elite in 1850s France.</p><p>The roots of gleaning go all the way back to Biblical times, when farmers left the corners of their fields unharvested so strangers and the needy could have something to eat, said Carol Breitinger, a spokeswoman for the Society of St. Andrew. The Virginia-based ecumenical group that organizes large-scale gleaning efforts in 20 states.</p><p>"We salvage 20 to 30 million pounds of produce a year and all that food either would have been plowed under in the field or dumped into the landfill," she said. "There's nothing wrong with it. It's just either commercially not marketable, because it is blemished or the wrong size or wrong shape, or it's excess."</p><p>The week before Thanksgiving, Love's fledgling Farm to Pantry project rescued 330 pounds of fruits and vegetables for Healdsburg's needy. The harvest included persimmons, apples, delicata squash, pineapple guavas, acorn squash, figs, sweet dumpling squash, winter squash and onions.</p><p>At a time of increasing economic hardship unseen since the Great Depression, the group's contribution to the Healdsburg Shared Food Ministries Food Bank is a modest but well appreciated supplement, said Jose Lerma, who helps oversee the food pantry on Healdsburg Avenue.</p><p>"From the gleaners, we welcome everything they have," he said, noting that what doesn't go into food boxes is set outside for anyone in need to help themselves.</p><p>To gleaners like Love, a former teacher who worked for years on public policy issues relating to children for several nonprofit agencies, it simply makes sense.</p><p>"There's just such an incredible bounty we have here. I feel so fortunate to live here and to be able to go to the farmers' market and buy this beautiful food. And yet there are so many people who can't have it -- period."</p><p>The irony of so much need amidst such bounty inspired Love to start gleaning the Healdsburg Farmers Market earlier this season, gathering what was unsold at the end and delivering it to the food pantry. She is slowly building a grassroots network to connect volunteer pickers with farmers, backyard gardeners and property owners who have more produce than they can sell, consume or pick themselves.</p><p>To farmers too busy to gather up their excess or property owners who have old fruit orchards, the gleaners' services can be a gift.</p><p>"We're really happy these guys are doing this," said property owner John McKinney, as Love and her little crew, including Rosemary Rasori and Cathy Wilson, filled their flats with persimmons and figs from two of his trees. "There is no way we could ever consume all this fruit. Even if we put it up, we'd be eating for years from this one harvest."</p><p>Other groups also are trying to reap the region's agricultural leftovers for the less fortunate.</p><p>The Grateful Gleaners in Willits, despite setbacks from wildfires and an early frost, gathered more than three tons of fruits and vegetables this year for their community food bank as well as school cafeterias, the senior center and a soup kitchen.</p><p>"There's a certain frugality to it," said co-founder Karen Gridley, who has long informally gleaned for herself, asking permission to remove fruit when she sees a neglected tree. "But there's also an integrity to it."</p><p>Over the past two years, the nonprofit Petaluma Bounty Hunters have collected more than 83,000 pounds of food from farms, back yards and the Petaluma Farmers Market.</p><p>Gleaning is just one program of Petaluma Bounty, whose mission is to promote a healthy, sustainable food source for those in need through community gardens, an urban farm and a Bounty Box Food Club that makes weekly boxes of organic fruit and vegetables available to low-income families at wholesale prices.</p><p>Gleaners distribute their goods to community food banks, the Committee on the Shelterless, low-income seniors and the Petaluma Kitchen, which provides meals for the hungry.</p><p>"Everywhere you look there is food being wasted, and a lot of it is good food and it's healthy food," said Grayson James, executive director of Petaluma Bounty.</p><p>The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates 27 percent of food in the United States goes to waste. A 2004 study by the University of Arizona put the figure at closer to 50 percent.</p><p>Giving food to the poor got easier with the passage of a series of "Good Samaritan" laws in the 1990s that provided protection from civil or criminal liability for gleaners and others who donate food to the poor in good faith. Farmers who allow gleaners onto their fields for humanitarian causes also have liability protection, said Dave Kranz, a spokesman for the California Farm Bureau.</p><p>Given the high rate of unemployment and home foreclosures coming in a year of skyrocketing food costs, the demand for nutritional help is increasing. The Department of Agriculture last week reported the number of people receiving assistance is up to 30 million, an increase of nearly 10 percent since last year.</p><p>A Platteville, Colo., couple last weekend had to turn people away after some 40,000 responded to an offer to glean the harvest remains from their 600-acre farm.</p><p>Gleaning efforts, advocates say, not only add to the supply as lines for handouts grow longer, they provide fresh and healthy food in addition to the canned and packaged staples.</p><p>"It's just been a godsend," said Erin Hoffmann, resident services coordinator for Petaluma Ecumenical Properties, which provides affordable housing for low-income seniors. "The amazing thing I'm finding is that absolutely nothing goes to waste."</p><p>Seniors who survived the Depression and food rationing in World War II know how to make use of boxes of fruit and vegetables, either by canning, freezing, or turning them into casseroles, stews and desserts, she said.</p><p>Gleaning efforts seem to make more of a difference on a smaller scale.</p><p>David Goodman, executive director of the Redwood Empire Food Bank, said his agency would not turn away gleaned goods. But the demands of providing food for 60,000 people across Sonoma County every month makes gleaning impractical as a significant source for an agency that moves 5.5 million pounds of produce each year, he said.</p><p>Mary Kelley, director of the Healdsburg Farmers Market, is heartened by gleaners' efforts, but she is also concerned for the struggling small farmers who have leftovers at the end of the day. When she sees them lugging squash to the gleaning box, she sometimes wonders if they are "angry or despondent."</p><p>But she recalls one farmer turning to her and saying, "The earth is so bountiful."</p><p>"It's as if he was saying 'I have so much, I can give some away.' "</p><p>You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.</p>