This past Tuesday, the Campus Kitchen at Johns Hopkins University went on its first gleaning trip. I’ve been working on CKJHU’s communications since we got it started this past year, and this summer I’ve been assisting our founding coordinator as many of our other members have gone far and wide for their summer breaks. We were swamped with our seemingly never-ending start-up work, and we knew we didn’t have the man power to do our regular cooking shifts this summer, but we didn’t want CKJHU to lie dormant until the school year started again. After all, just because we get a summer break as college students it doesn’t mean hunger does. In fact, if you think of how many kids who qualify for free and reduced lunches during the year don’t get food right now, hunger is probably even more daunting now than it is when the school bell rings again. Naturally, we had to do something, and an opportunity fell in our laps.

We got an email from Ariel, who coordinates CKs in the Mid-Atlantic region, about gleaning with the Mid-Atlantic Gleaning Network. What’s gleaning? Quite simply, it’s a practice that makes a lot of sense in the food recovery world. In the context of food, gleaning is picking the excess from the fruits and vegetables of the field so that nothing is wasted. The man who guided us on our gleaning trip, Pastor Hall, pointed out that it’s a tradition that can be found in the Bible, in the context of familiar Old Testament figures like Ruth who are associated with holiness. It makes sense, because if all this produce that gets left behind sits and rots in the field, it’s not only a waste of food but also a waste of resources that could have fed someone who was hungry.

Naturally, we got on board right away. We organized announcements and trip arrangements and ended up with seven volunteers, one of whom was an intern and the other six of whom were pre-college students taking summer classes at Hopkins and who wanted to do something good for the community during the stay. We would have had more people, but we could only take two vans full and so we could only take the first six students to respond. It’s a great problem to have too many people who care, right?

On Tuesday afternoon, we loaded up the vans and drove about an hour and a half from Baltimore to Clinton, Maryland, a little town in Prince George’s County. It was farmland and country stores all around, the perfect kind of place to appreciate gleaning and why it’s an old idea that shouldn’t be lost in a modern context. We met up with Pastor Hall, who works with the Mid-Atlantic Gleaning Network, Jamie from DC Central Kitchen, and Ariel, and off we went, following their vans to a field of collard greens and kale right off a residential road. There, the pastor gave us his thoughts on gleaning and instructed us in gleaning the collards. Collard greens grow out of what looks like a mini palm tree that rises from the ground, and they fan outward. The inner part of the plant, called the crown, is a group of small, light green leaves that are tightly packed together, as if to enclose something that needs protection. The leaves get darker and bigger as you move to the outside. We were to pick only the outer leaves and let the crown stay intact. That way, the plant would not be harmed, and it would gradually regenerate itself so that the cycle could continue.

We stayed for a couple of hours, leaning over into the plants and filling mesh bags with leaves that were going into someone’s stew, or maybe a frying pan, later on. These plants are very healthy, Jamie reminded us, and we had the opportunity to pick a lot. By the end of the evening, as the Sun started to go down and we were about to head back to Baltimore, we had filled enough bags to fill the back of each van. It was incredible, and the work hadn’t even ended yet. When we got back to our own city, we took the bags to the very grateful members of Second Shiloh, a food pantry about fifteen minutes away from the Hopkins campus. As we piled the bags high onto tables in their storage space, we thought about the fact that a few spare leaves here and there on a plant were now providing meals to dozens of people. It’s a staggering thought, and should not be taken lightly.

Our gleaning trips will continue this summer, and the gleaning networks are growing all the time. Pastor Hall was telling us that he is about to get office space from Baltimore City’s government.

In this age, we have machines that can pick plants for us and all sorts of efficient means of preparing them so that we don’t ever really think about them in their raw, Sun-nurtured state, but if anyone should bring that consciousness back it’s the Campus Kitchens. The work that we do inspires people who meet us, because we work based on such a simple idea. A little excess food here and there means ending hunger for an individual, and we are the workers who provide the middle step that makes that happy ending. But there’s something truly amazing about claiming what comes directly from the Earth to do the same thing, which is why gleaning is so cool. The Earth keeps providing, but if so many people are hungry then something must be getting lost along the way. Gleaning is a great way to remember why no one needs to be hungry, and it’s just another great way to make a dent in hunger as an international issue. I couldn’t recommend it more highly as something to get involved in.

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