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Gleaners at Farmers' Market snap up produce for food pantries

Pat Schneider  —  9/08/2008 8:51 am

Customers were selecting from among the brightly colored peppers at Tom and Brenda Krall's stall at the Dane County Farmers' Market on Saturday as another browser sorted through the fresh produce from Deerfield Greenhouse.

Sheila Muldoon, a volunteer gleaner wearing the signature red vest, was collecting for area food pantries in a program administered by the Community Action Coalition of South Central Wisconsin. She's part of a band of volunteers who comb the market weekly in peak season for CAC.

The program, which also accepts from farmers' markets on the city's west and north sides and Fitchburg, collected 35,000 pounds of food for Dane County food pantries in 2007, and collections this year are probably on a similar pace, said Chris Brockel, manager of CAC's food and garden division.

The gleaning program is a critical step in getting fresh, nutritious meals to households that rely on pantries to help put food on the table, say emergency food system and nutrition experts.

"It's vital to the emergency food system and to connecting low-income folks to the local food supply," Brockel said.

"Madison is big on locally grown sustainable organic foods, but it's expensive to shop that way," Brockel said. "Folks without a lot of money may not be able to make those choices. This is a way to connect them to healthy foods grown within 100 miles."

Kathy Sandefur recently retired from more than 20 years -- as a volunteer and later staff member -- as manager of the food pantry at First United Methodist Church in downtown Madison.

Every Monday, she would load up a van with fresh produce from CAC, she recalled. "It all just got snapped up," she said.

"Sometimes I'd bring back something a little unusual, and people would ask: 'What is this?' That's a great opportunity to say, 'That's a tomatillo.' And someone else in the pantry lobby would say: 'Here's how to cook it.'"

Pantry users snap up green summer vegetables, zucchini, winter squash -- there are never enough potatoes -- "and if a clove of garlic shows up, that's gone too," said Sandefur.

Successful use of perishable produce in the food pantry system varies, said Lesly Scott, a nutrition education program coordinator with UW Extension.

"It depends on the pantry and location and how savvy volunteers are about encouraging users to take items," said Scott, who helped create a cookbook for pantry users incorporating fresh produce.

Brockel, whose agency has managed the gleaning program for about five years, said he works with about 10 volunteer groups -- 8 to 12 each -- who divide up the season to cover anywhere from one to four market days.

Muldoon and her husband, Gary, are longtime volunteers through Our Lady Queen of Peace parish on Madison's west side, where they've tapped into the Boy Scout community as a source of volunteers for the four markets each summer they cover.

With carts from the CAC warehouse, volunteers spread out into the market and visit the vendors, who are looking for the familiar red vests as the market day winds down in the early afternoon. Collected food is brought back to the CAC truck right on site and quickly stored in coolers at CAC's warehouse on the east side of the city.

Time was, Muldoon recalled, volunteers brought their own boxes and transported food to the pantries on their own. Today, with the use of CAC's resources, gleaning is a much simpler task, she said.

"It's an easy thing to do," Muldoon said. It's the least one can do, she reflected, "with so many people on hard times. It stems from our Christianity -- that's what keeps us going."

On Saturday, Gary Mott, also a longtime volunteer, worked with Muldoon collecting peppers, beans, tomatoes, squash, corn and radishes. "It's extra food for people who need it," Mott said. "It's wonderful."

Dane County Farmers' Market manager Larry Johnson said the gleaning program is an opportunity for vendors both to move surplus produce with a short shelf life and to donate to a good cause.

"On occasion, I've seen people who leave early leave a box or two with their neighbors to give to the gleaners," he said.

Organizers and volunteers in the program praised the generosity of vendors.

"Anybody who sells food up there is a donor to us at some point," said Brockel. "Some every week, some as they have things."

New volunteers invariably are moved by the generosity of vendors, Muldoon said. "They are so pleased the vendors are willing to give up hard-earned produce and happy to be helping to feed the hungry."

It's been a mediocre year, Tom Krall was saying at his stall Saturday, what with too much rain early on and not enough mid-summer.

"We can only give surplus -- what we have left at the end," said Krall, whose father was among the first vendors at the market and whose family has donated food for the pantries for some 15 years.

This year, mediocre season or not, is no different. "Oh, sure," Krall said, "because somebody needs to eat right."

Pat Schneider  —  9/08/2008 8:51 am