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Glean

by Leah Koenig · September 19th, 2007
America, Farming, Holidays, Israel, Leftovers, Seasonality, Vegetables

Sukkot is coming up next week. As a self-described natural Jew, I love this harvest holiday. I love decorating a sukkah with gourds and juicy apples (or in the case of my friend Julie’s sukkah two years ago, Jackson Pollack-style splash paint). I love that it’s a time of year when Jews unabashedly sniff citrus fruit and beat palm fronds on the ground. I love that we pray for rain.

ruth.jpg

It’s also a time of year when I start to think about gleaning - which, as a non-farmer I admit feels a little weird, but actually couldn’t be more relevant. As we learn from Ruth’s story (which is read on another Jewish harvest holiday, Shavuot), the Jewish mitzvah of pe’ah commands that farmers leave the corners of their field to the poor.

This might sound like an amazing act of tzedakah, and I have no quibble with that. But on the other hand, it also just makes sense. This time of year (barring significant drought or too much rain), many farmers - at least the smaller-scale, family farms that I work with -have a tremendous amount of food. The summer crops are tapering off with final bursts of tomatoes and grean beans, while the fall crop of beets, potatoes, and squash are now fat enough for the first harvest. You might just say that there is just too much food. Pe’ah evens things out, ensuring that the hungry have enough to eat and the farmer enjoys extra hands in the harvest.

Granted, this is a completely romanticized version of what may or may not actually happened in Biblical Israel, but the notion of it is still powerful. My good friend Anna loves to say that the best kind of answers are the ones that accidentally solve a problem you didn’t know you were asking. I think pe’ah is like that.

Many synagogues across the country have started pairing up with local farms for “modern day pe’ah” where they get a group of people together to harvest the corners of the field and donate it to a local food pantry or shelter. Check out for farms in your area (here’s a good place to start looking, and here’s another) and give them a ring - there’s a good chance they’ll appreciate the extra help!

(x-posted at Lilith’s blog)

Anna!  If you read this, I’d love to be reminded of the exact quote…

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2 Responses to “Glean”

  1. Anna Says:
    September 20th, 2007 at 9:38 am

    You’re such a sweetheart. The quote is from Michael Corbett, a sustainable-design architect, and it goes: “You know you’re on the right track when your solution to one problem accidentally solves several others.”

    Like donating the leftovers of a CSA, another example of gleaning for those with less easy access to a field. If you don’t pick up your share one week, it can be donated to a food pantry or soup kitchen for immediate use.

    I don’t know about the idea of gleaning as a way to take care of the situation of “too much food” tho, for a couple of reasons. A/ farmers are running a business, and they sure as heck aren’t producing squash or tomatoes in February (unless they’re using heated greenhouses or live somewhere warm). So an abundance of food in the fall means (might mean? should mean?) an abundance of income. B/ Even if you take the money out of it, that abundance of fall food should be preserved for the winter and early spring, when you can’t possibly stand to eat one more potato , not one - no! Canned pumpkin, parboiled & frozen squash, onions and other root crops in the root cellar — fall is a time of abundance but if you amertize it out over the entire year — you might just come out even, until next springs first shoots of kale and radishes come up.

    Moral of the story: gleaning is a year-round thing — it shouldn’t be something we do because of abundance, or in spite of it. But if it’s not already your minhag, by all means, let the cornucopia of sukkot/thanksgiving/fall harvest inspire you to action!

  2. Leah Koenig Says:
    September 20th, 2007 at 12:25 pm

    Thanks Anna. As the non-farmer in this conversation, I ultimately defer to your expertise…but I still disagree with you to some degree.

    I totally agree that an abundance of food should mean an abundance of income for farmers. And there might be some farms that, at the end of the week, have sold absolutely everything they harvested. But I don’t think that’s always, or even usually, the case.

    Produce obviously has a shelf life, and a certain window of time when it can be sold. I’ve seen farmers at the end of the market day giving away unsold produce because it was going to go bad before they could sell it anyway. (I’ve luckily been on the receiving end of that too!)

    Maybe the problem is simply that the farmer’s market isn’t the most efficient way to sell produce…but then again, CSAs certainly also have leftovers and restaurants and supermarkets throw away tons of unsold produce every day/week. So - gleaning to me is just one extra way to find a place for the abundance - and sometimes overabundance - of the blessings of the earth.

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