Gleaners Help Feed America’s Needy

Believe it or not, one story out of the Atlanta Olympic Games hasn’t received as much attention as it deserves.

It’s about the success of a practice we call gleaning - assembling the excess food from a huge event such as the Olympics and getting it to the poor and homeless who need it most.

Final figures aren’t available yet, but it appears certain that records were set in Atlanta in this regard. The gleaning accomplished there may well prove, over the long run, to be the Olympics story that echoes most loudly in communities across the United States.

Modern-day gleaners help coordinate donations of surplus food from farmers, restaurants, caterers and grocers. They turn it into healthful meals in kitchens that often double as training grounds for future chefs. And they deliver it to grass-roots organizations that, once freed from kitchen duty, can focus on helping solve other problems.

Gleaning is a time-honored way of helping needy people help themselves. “When you harvest your crops, don’t reap the corners of your fields and don’t pick up stray grains of wheat from the ground,” the Bible’s Old Testament admonishes. “Leave them for the poor and for those traveling through.”

Atlanta’s gleaners worked to collect as much food over the past few weeks as their local food bank did in all of last year.

A glimpse at the provisions that Atlanta chefs ordered to feed visitors - including 15 tons of bananas, 77,000 pounds of cheese and 120,000 pounds of fish - boggles the mind.

What is harder to grasp is the dedication and enterprise of gleaners trying to turn all the surplus food into 200,000 nourishing meals for Atlanta’s needy.

This was food that never made it out of the kitchen - perfectly good food that would have gone to waste if it had not been used quickly.

This was nearly a half-million pounds of food - just a drop compared with the 13 billion pounds of food wasted annually in the United States - and it provided relief for only a few of the 20 million Americans who regularly go to bed hungry.

But this food made a real difference to many people in Atlanta, and the gleaning at the Olympics highlights an important breakthrough in combating hunger: central kitchens, able to take advantage of surplus food to feed more people more efficiently than ever before.

The gleaning effort in Atlanta has the potential to “raise the world’s collective consciousness about the hunger problem,” says Atlanta Community Food Bank founder Bill Bolling. “We want to leave a legacy and working model for other host cities to follow.”

Political leaders can help spread the word at this summer’s Democratic and Republican national nominating conventions in Chicago and San Diego (where food also will be gleaned). And they can help promote gleaning in their own communities, which face the same challenge of helping an army of poor Americans.

The challenge is a moral one, made more so by the children who fill the ranks of this sad army.

The situation in Atlanta mirrors that nationwide: Children account for four out of every 10 people served by food banks in Atlanta and other U.S. cities.

One in four children lives on a monthly family budget lower than $1,100 - or the average amount a family attending the Olympics spent in just 48 hours.

The sorry spectacle of people going hungry in the United States is one that we need not tolerate. We may not know how to solve a lot of our problems, but America’s bounty is the envy of the world - and America knows how to beat hunger.

Gleaning is one way - a way in which we can help people help themselves, a way that is catching hold across the United States.

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