Rich Pickings

Down through a stubbly field already harvested, across the wooden bridge over a stream and up the slope, the gleaners marched with their wheelbarrow and plastic trays ready to be filled.
They had come prepared. Prepared to dodge nettles and brambles and swat away insects, the volunteers from Food in Community were beginning a morning in among the fruit bushes. Recurrants,
blackcurrants and gooseberries – and a few blackberries – were their target.

It goes back to Biblical times

This is not a pick your own. This is a pick for someone else. Food In Community supplies 7,500 deliveries each year of free, organic produce which otherwise would be ploughed back or rejected as too small, misshapen or almost at its sell by date, or simply surplus, ( grade-outs, in the trade) to struggling households in Totnes and surrounds, and to charities and community groups across Devon.

I thought I’d join the pickers to find out more.

First off – it’s not foraging. That is fossicking in hedgerows for extra titbits, unusual plants growing wild, not grown commercially. Professional foragers often sell their wild leaves, mushrooms and so on. Gleaning has an ancient history, as FIC co-founder and co- director David Markson told me as I braved the brambles for a mouthful of fruit (sorry, but I missed breakfast). “It goes back to Biblical times I believe. It was written that the landowner shouldn’t harvest everything, and once they have harvested, the gleaners should be let in. I think in some places bells were rung after harvest and that was a sign for people to come and glean.”

No bells out here in a Riverford Farm field which has been left to nature – nothing but the hum of the overhead pylons and the cooing of the wood pidgeons watching their berries being gently stripped from the wild thistle-tangled bushes. The field is uneconomic to farm any more, but the bushes keep on growing anyway. For the recipients, who are all referred to FIC as in need, they get what would be a £5 box of berries in the shops to add to their free veg.

The romance of gleaning has been captured by many painters of pastoral peasant scenes, but the reality is somewhat less rose-tinted, especially in the winter when the beetroots are more mud than root. David explained that he got the idea more than a decade ago while on a field trip as part of his Schumacher course. He approached Guy Singh-Watson to ask if he could glean in his
fields. “It was a wet winter’s day and Guy said I can do one better – come and get our grade-outs, so we started doing that as well. We sorted in a freezing cold, dark barn with fork lifts coming and going, then we moved into a car park.”

Eventually Dartington Trust found them a space on the estate and then when Foxhole shut, FIC moved to the next door School Farm.

Now an exciting new door is opening with the awarding of a £1.5 million Defra grant. Project Beetroot will establish a food processing hub in the area, where surplus food – a cauliflower glut for instance, or the half ton of courgettes currently being collected each week – can be turned into saleable products and meals for a cafe, as well as the usual food boxes. The hope is that it will employ local people, train them up, and make money which will be ploughed back into the enterprise.

At the end of the morning, punnets full of soft fruit ready to be wheeled back to base for boxing, the volunteers get lunch. Jessica, who helps with the tea and cakes at the FIC monthly pay what you feel cafe in Totnes (next one in September), said: “It’s nice to be outside, it’s not so nice to get eaten by horseflies, but it’s nice to be in a field and see nature a little bit wild.”

Jan Hornby, who is a therapeutic horticulturalist and leads the gleaners, says more volunteers are always welcome. “I think it tackles social isolation, it’s really good to be to in nature, it’s a good laugh, and it’s all for a good cause. The volunteers are really valued.”

More pickers and helpers are always welcome.
See foodincommunity.org for more details. It is also on Facebook,
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