Gleaning roundup 2014
Greetings glorious gleaners! It’s been a really busy time for the Gleaning Network, as the past few months have been peak harvesting periods! We’ve been harvesting tonnes of food that would otherwise have gone to waste on farms for charity.
In 2014, we’ve gleaned 54 tonnes of delicious fruit and veg across 31 gleaning days with 340 volunteers, in Bristol, Manchester, Sussex, Cambridgeshire and Kent. That’s 675,000 portions of fruit and veg for the hungry and food insecure of the UK, so huge congrats to all our volunteers.
Some of the highlights have been our debut gleaning day in Bristol, a huge sweetcorn glean in Sussex, a colossal brassica glean in Kent, our first gleans of onions and potatoes in Cambridgeshire, a great cauli and potato glean in Manchester, and these beautiful wonky squash.
We’ve saved apples that were the “wrong” colour and size for supermarkets, cauliflowers that couldn’t be sold because of the Russian embargo and a rush of cheap imports, onions which fell through the gaps in the harvester because they were too small, cabbages which were rejected by supermarkets for being a little pigeon pecked, and more…
We’ve donated to FareShare, CFE, the Matthew Tree Project in Bristol, The Ferry Project in Cambridgeshire, Food For All in London, and others, as well as selling some produce to social enterprises Community Shop, Rubies in the Rubble and Snact to raise money for our charitable gleaning.
We’ve also been busy spreading gleaning around Europe, with Gleaning Network EU! Gleaning has already kicked off in Belgium, Poland, Spain, France and Greece.
Finally, gleaning days tied in with Feeding the 5000 events around the world have been sprouting up too, including gleaning days in Oakland (US), North Carolina and Barcelona.
We’ve also had coverage in Kent Voice, and have some very exciting news upcoming, where we’ll be featured on the TV programme of a prominent celebrity chef (ooooh… watch this space).
If you’re interested in volunteering, and you’d like us to let you know when there’s a gleaning day coming up near you, please sign up to our gleaning list!
So peace and potatoes, over and sprout, thanks shallot, and other than a few last gleans of the year, we’ll see you in the Spring!
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