By Brian Myers and Edgar Montejano
A small but growing corps of food activist volunteers calling themselves urban gleaners are scouring San Diego neighborhoods, peering over fences and knocking on doors in search of residents willing to let them haul their fruit away to local food pantries, where it’s usually easier to stock up on day-old bread and dented canned food than fresh produce.
Voiceofsandiego.org’s Adrian Florido and the Media Arts Center San Diego’s Brian Myers followed the gleaners to a La Mesa backyard filled with citrus trees. Here is what they saw:
Click here to read Florido’s story
Transcript:
Lara Hamburger, International Rescue Committee: I’m here harvesting with Harvesting San Diego. We’re taking food that’s otherwise rotting on the tree and falling on the ground. And we’re bringing it to folks who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford this food. Which isn’t only fresh, delicious oranges, but is locally grown, is pesticide free. This is stuff that’s expensive in grocery stores, that people don’t have the luxury of eating, even though it’s the most basic food. It’s so nutritious, it’s so amazing and delicious and we’re getting it to people at zero cost.
Wednesday is our community distribution day, so that’s when we distribute to about 60 families, on average now. That’s when we will try to push most of it out. And if we don’t get it out we will keep it to the end of the week and probably donate it to other agencies in City Heights.
Philip Dunn, Harvest San Diego: We’re associated now with the San Diego Roots Sustainable Food Project and they have a really good web presence, they have a good website and they do a lot of outreach, educational programs. There’s actually a couple other, in the last year since we started, a couple other organizations that are really expanding and were sort of creating a little collaborative where we’ve got somebody in East County, we’re going to get some people up in North County.
Lara Hamburger: Since I’ve been involved, we’ve done a lot of harvest out in East County. Often, there are calls or emails from people who are like, “I have one big grapefruit tree, I live in North Park.” And it will just take one trip with volunteers, where as somewhere like this, where we have 20 or more trees, this we could come back to over and over.
Philip Dunn: We had a guy up in Escondido, he just had a whole bunch of extra oranges. He had about 25 orange trees that he let us pick. We got over two-thousand pounds over the course of a couple weeks. We’ve also done a little door to door, where we knock on people’s doors if you see a tree that’s obviously got more fruit than a family of four can possibly eat. Usually, people have a plan for it or they’re really happy to let us come and harvest it when it’s ready.
Lara Hamburger: It’s hard for pantries, especially those that are volunteer operated, to keep food moving in and out, so that they don’t have to deal with a ton of waste, they don’t have a good system to deal with all this waste. Also, there’s just not really good produce being donated. So, I think that we’re actually pretty unique in that most of the food that we distribute is fresh.
Philip Dunn: Most of this land was orchards at some point. So, people are now homeowners and don’t really want to spend the time to take care of the trees or harvest the fruit. So, there’s a lot of extra fruit in the area. It’s kind of neat to see that there’s people who are both willing to donate and willing to do the harvesting and distributing it, because the food banks need as much help as they can get right now getting, especially, the fresh produce like this.
Lara Hamburger: There’s a lot of fruit that’s going to waste, a lot of also good fresh vegetables in people’s gardens that they might not be using fast enough and we would always love donations of that.