THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607140035
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DIANE TENNANT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 182 lines
Nancy Tew enunciates carefully. Then she spells.
Gleaning, she says. With a G, not a C.
``Gleaning is just not a word that's in everyday vocabulary,'' she says, sounding a little more apologetic than the Old Testament, whose words are quoted on her T-shirt.
In the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, gleaning - leaving unharvested food for the poor - is the law. No apology. Just do it.
Tew is not so rigid. She says please and thank you to the farmers. She casts no agricultural market bulletins to the ground in anger, chastises no transgressors, raises her hands not above her head unless they're full of green beans.
But she suits action to The Word, crawling on her hands and knees through dusty fields in search of beans left behind by mechanical pickers, potatoes passed over because they're not pretty, cabbage left to rot because no one will buy it. By evening, she says with quiet satisfaction, this handful of beans will be on a poor child's plate.
America wastes 20 percent of the food it grows each year, Tew says, enough to feed 49 million people.
Food for thought.
Just days before, Tew had gotten word that an Eastern Shore farmer would soon harvest his field, and beans would be left behind. As director of the statewide Gleaning Network, she seized the opportunity.
Tew works on short notice, ready to find volunteer labor for the next day, if necessary. Ready to do it herself if that's the only way.
``I feel like I work for the people we're feeding,'' she said. ``You feel the responsibility. If the food is there and people are hungry, you've got to get it.''
Tew actually works for the Society of St. Andrew, a mission of the United Methodist Church that is based in Big Island, a small town between Lynchburg and Roanoke.
The Society of St. Andrew began in 1979 when three United Methodist pastors joined forces to obey Jesus' command ``Feed my sheep.'' The society provides food for the soul through retreats and workshops, and food for the body through the Gleaning Network, the 174 million pounds of donated culls to the Potato Project and the teen gleaning/study retreat called Harvest of Hope.
The Gleaning Network, which was organized in 1988, has fed people in six states and the District of Columbia. In 1995, 130 groups gleaned 335,000 pounds of Virginia produce.
Tew works from her home in Chesapeake, finding farmers with extra crops, volunteers to harvest them, transportation to get the produce to the needy. She keeps up with market prices and helps farmers get tax credit for their donations.
Much of the donated produce is only cosmetically flawed. Some may have insect damage, some may be rejected at processing plants for being too sweet or too large or too anything else.
``American consumers are very, very particular about produce. One little spot on a tomato and we won't buy it, which is good for gleaning but bad for the farmers,'' Tew said. ``I think we shop at grocery stores too much instead of at farmer's markets. We forget where food comes from.''
On this hot summer morning, it came from Ad Nottingham's farm in Franktown, on the Eastern Shore. The scab-dry field wisped dust over Tew's rolled-hem jeans, and she shaded her eyes with her hand.
Only a few inches of stem remained in the ground; the rest of the plant had been clipped off - leaf, bean and all - by a machine.
But, like Jack, Tew saw golden opportunity in those beanstalks. Each plant still bore beans, growing too low to the ground to be snatched by machinery. Hand picking would cost the farmer more than he would gain in selling the beans at 50 cents a pound.
But it was green gold for the local food bank. To cash in, Tew gathered teens and youth from Aldersgate and Lynnhaven United Methodist Churches in Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, and Boy Scouts from Franktown.
``Look how many beans there are right here,'' called 9-year-old Sarah Hassmer as she bent over a plant.
``Some of these plants, especially the ones that have a few leaves on them, are full of beans,'' Tew agreed.
Tew wanted to make a good impression on Nottingham. The farmer had learned about gleaning through his church, and this was the network's first visit to his farm. Tew wanted to be invited back.
``We'll glean anything anyone wants to give us,'' Tew said, crawling up the row of beanstalks. ``Blueberries are fun. You don't have to bend over. But we discourage eating in the field.
``If you've been blessed enough that you can buy the vegetables, you need to buy them from the farmer to help him, too.''
These children knew hunger only as fleeting desire for a late-night pizza. They were eager to enjoy a morning in the sun, to catch a toad squatting under a bean leaf, equally ready to retire to a picnic lunch after two hours of picking. Four bags of beans - 240 pounds - went into the back of the van.
Tew goes with the flow. ``What you have to do is be a little bit adaptable and not mind getting a little bit dirty and not mind the sun,'' she said. ``I enjoy the quiet out here. You can hear the birds and see the frogs. Gleaning is a service activity that a whole family can do.''
Another day, another farm. Tew instructs her crew in the fine points of cabbage picking.
Green beans are easy: Hold the plant, pick a bean at a time until your hand is full, empty it in the mesh bag. Repeat.
Cabbage is another story. It involves a knife and an 8-pound vegetable.
These babies are big - bigger, in fact, than many humans at birth. A cabbage picker must push down the outer leaves, locate the thick stem between head and root, and saw it halfway through. Flip a brown worm out of the way. Push the head sideways until the stem cracks. Heft that vegetable into a mesh bag, and a 50-pound bag into a truck. Repeat until 3,100 pounds of Pungo cabbage is headed for the Swanson Homes housing project in Portsmouth.
On this day, Tew has brought the needy to help themselves at nature's board. Of the four teens who have volunteered to help, three have never seen a farm.
Jermaine Foster, 14, gazed around the cornfields, blackberry bushes, rows of tomatoes, beans and cabbage. ``All this his?'' he asked, nodding at farmer G.W. Henley.
The cabbage were planted as a pick-your-own crop, aimed to coincide with the strawberry harvest, which draws many customers to the farm. But the cabbages came ripe weeks after the strawberries were gone, and no one would drive that far just for a cabbage.
``It's just a matter of days we're gonna plow this field up, and I'd rather you to have it than plow it up,'' Henley told Tew. ``We could probably have sold this cabbage; it's just that we didn't have the labor to do it.''
Swanson Homes had the labor, and the hungry mouths to feed. The Portsmouth Redevelopment and Housing Authority loaned two vans to transport gleaners and to carry the cabbage back to the neighborhood recreation center for distribution.
Dorita Epps, the center's director, saw more than food in the fields.
``The boys are looking for summer employment,'' she said. ``I can't give them employment, but I can give them work. Especially this time of the month, when people are low of food, it's a real blessing.''
The boys were eager to get into the cabbage field, equally enthusiastic about seeing a grasshopper and a chance to get a head.
``When you grow up, maybe one of you will have a farm like this,'' Epps called to them.
``I'm gonna have a mansion,'' answered 12-year-old Jonathan Holley.
``The only mansion you should look for, honey, is the one in heaven,'' she replied.
Many cabbages remained in the field when the gleaners finished, but the vans could carry no more. Back at the rec center, the produce was piled in the hallway.
``I'm gonna take two of 'em home,'' said Jermaine, slumping, tired, in a chair.
``Take four,'' Epps urged. ``As hard as you worked out there, you could take nine. Ten.''
``I only want two,'' Foster insisted.
A delay in unloading had Tew chafing, apologetically, to get home. ``I've got a bunch of cherry trees in Orange County,'' she explained. ``I need to go home and see if I can get somebody to pick cherries in the next three or four days.'' MEMO: TO LEARN MORE
To contact the Gleaning Network, call 483-6376. ILLUSTRATION: D. KEVIN ELLIOTT color photos/The Virginian-Pilot
With a field of cabbage free for the picking, Dorita Epps and others
came for a ``gleaning'' run by Nancy Tew of the Gleaning Network.
Dorita Epps and Jermaine Foster hoist cabbage, part of 3,100 pounds
bound for Portsmouth's Swanson Homes.
D. KEVIN ELLIOTT photos/The Virginian-Pilot
Nancy Tew works on short notice, ready to find volunteer labor for
the next day, if necessary. ``If the food is there and people are
hungry, you've got to get it,'' she says. Tew works for the Society
of St. Andrew, started in 1979 when three United Methodist pastors
joined forces to obey Jesus' command ``Feed my sheep.''
Butch Fountain of the Portsmouth Redevelopment and Housing
Authority, which loaned two vans for transportation, loads cabbage
at G.W. Henley's farm in the Pungo area of Virginia Beach. Many
cabbages remained in the field when the gleaners finished, but the
vans - with 3,100 pounds - could carry no more.
Ali Jabbar, left, holds a bag as Christina Rodgers drops in a
cabbage. The two worked at a farm in Pungo with a group from Swanson
Homes, picking cabbage that farmer G.W. Henley didn't have the labor
to pick. The Portsmouth Redevelopment and Housing Authority loaned
two vans to transport gleaners and to carry the cabbage back to the
neighborhood recreation center for distribution.
Nancy Tew of the Gleaning Network organized the picking, heeding the
words of Deuteronomy in the Bible: ``When thou cuttest down thine
harvest in thy field, and hast forgot a sheaf in the field . . . it
shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow . .
.'' by CNB