Digging Deeper...

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The United States scraps nearly 80 billion pounds of food every year – about 30-40 % of the entire US food supply, says USDA. That equates to 219 pounds of waste per person, notes Kathryn Reed, Society of Professional Journalists. “That’s like every person in America throwing more than 650 average sized apples right into the garbage — or rather right into landfills.” As a matter of fact, food is the single largest component taking up space inside U.S. landfills, accounting for more than 22% of municipal solid waste.
By: Dennis McLaughlin, McLaughlin Writers LLC – Sources: USDA Economic Research Service; After the Harvest Annual Report 2021; Autumn MorningSky, Marketing & Communications, After the Harvest; Interviews with Lisa Ousley, Past Executive Director-Advisor, After the Harvest, and Michael Watson, Executive Director, After the Harvest.

Fighting Food Security “Upstream”

Food waste is often described as a “farm-to-fork” problem.  For the most part, conversations about food waste usually center on oversized portions at dinner, kids not eating all their vegetables and food products being discarded along the supply chain for being beyond their “best by” or “sell by” dates or not in compliance with processing, packaging and labeling regulations.

But those are downstream situations, influenced by efficient, productive food processing systems and more reliable distribution and warehousing operations that can create food abundance or surpluses. In the last ten years, though, attention has been aimed at the waste occurring upstream – in the fields and orchards. Bruised, scarred vegetables and fruits (whose freshness and quality have not necessarily been compromised) are regularly abandoned. “According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, some 52% of all produce grown in our country never reaches a human consumer,” says Lisa Ousley, who is retiring as founding executive director of Kansas City, Missouri-based After The Harvest (ATH).  “About 10% of produce is lost at the farm level – either it is missed by automated harvesting equipment or passed over by field hands who do the initial grading in the field,” she explains.

Ten years ago Ousley and a small group who believed no food should go to waste founded ATH.  Their assumption was that people experiencing food insecurity, specifically those in the Greater Kansas City area, deserved healthy food. “We started the organization in May 2014 with two chairs, a file cabinet and a strong belief in our mission,” says Ousley. Using office space and computers on loan from Harvesters–The Community Food Network, she adds, “We launched After the Harvest with a two-person staff and never looked back.”

A decade later – with a staff of nine and with thousands of volunteers – ATH distributes rescued fruits and vegetables via a gleaning program directly to agencies feeding hungry people. ATH is one of the top five produce donors to Harvesters–The Community Food Network.  

“Harvesters is our primary distribution partner, delivering our produce via our gleaning and truckload programs to agencies within their service area,” says Michael Watson, ATH’s new Executive Director.  This unique partnership, he notes, gives Harvesters access to fresh-from-the-farm produce that is otherwise unavailable to them.

Seeing The Need

Lisa Ousley traces the origins of modern food bank operations back to the 1970s. Her moment of awareness as a youngster that people worldwide might not have access to all that they need, she recalls, came with the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. The long lines at gas stations that Ousley saw in person and viewed on television underscored the notion that humans could go wanting for things that weren’t exactly in short supply. There was plenty of oil in the ground and in the holds of tanker ships. Likewise, plenty of food was being tossed out or left in the fields to rot. Or unnecessarily graded by stringent regulatory standards that affected supply and availability.

In the late 1970s, says Ousley, global communities introduced organizations and movements to ease the plight of those living in poverty and food insecurity. She points to the formation of the Society of St. Andrew (SoSA), a grassroots, faith-based, hunger relief nonprofit working with all denominations to bridge the hunger gap between 96 billion pounds of food wasted every year in the United States and the nearly 40 million Americans who live in poverty.  SoSA relies on support from donors, volunteers, and farmers as they glean nutritious excess produce from farmers' fields and orchards after harvest and deliver it to people in need across the United States. SoSA provides nutritious, healthy produce through programs such as the Potato Project, Harvest of Hope and the Seed Potato Project

Michael Watson’s awareness of food insecurity came sharply into focus on the basketball court. Well, not exactly. But basketball opened his eyes to countries and areas where hunger was pervasive. Watson, who was inducted this month into the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, is the all-time UMKC hoops scoring leader. After graduation in 2004, Watson signed a free-agent contract with the Boston Celtics and went on to play professionally for ten more seasons in Poland, Turkey, Italy, France and his native Puerto Rico.  The travel schedules of these teams brought Watson to a number of impoverished regions where he got a rare glimpse of what poverty and food insecurity actually looked like.

“Playing in so many countries and cities where hunger was prevalent, gave me an up-close picture of the situation, and got me thinking about how I might get involved in something tangible to ease the problem,” Watson says. As he assumes the position of executive director, Watson is planning ways to scale up ATH’s impact on the region surrounding the greater Kansas City area.

Addressing The Need

Since its founding in 2014, ATH has recovered more than 30 million pounds of fruits and vegetables, and delivered produce to agencies feeding 226,000 food-insecure children, seniors and families every month. In 2021, ATH changed its strategy for the way it recovers fruits and vegetables. This shift was both operational and strategic. “As part of our COVID response strategies in 2020,” explains Ousley, “ATH focused efforts on expanding our local Gleaning Program.” ATH pursued funding to support this expansion, and secured a large COVID-inspired grant that arrived in December 2020. This and other transformational COVID funding allowed ATH to purchase a refrigerated truck, lease cold-storage space and develop produce distribution hub pickups resulting in the partnerships with Loffredo Fresh and Kanbe’s Markets,” Ousley says. Also during this time, ATH expanded its Fair Share program in Rich Hill to increase the volume of produce coming from Rich Hill farmers.  ATH also began working with Douglas County on its Community Organized Gleaning that resulted in the Lawrence Gleaning Program. “Together these efforts grew the overall volume of produce we rescued locally and regionally,” Ousley adds, “to surpass the one-million pound mark for the Gleaning Program in 2021 for the first time in our history.”

Breaking down its impact even further, ATH marks these accomplishments in 2022:

  • Provided 108 varieties of fruits and vegetables

  • Supplied nutritious produce to over 360 agencies

  • Partnered with more than 175 local farmers

  • Rescued excess produce from 15 local farmers markets

  • Saved 1 million pounds of produce through its gleaning program and another 1.5 million pounds via its truckloads programs

Recent Milestones

At the beginning of 2021 as effects of the pandemic continued to plague the global community, ATH shifted strategic gears in pursuit of its mission: To fight food insecurity, improve nutrition, and reduce food waste. The primary change involved a distribution strategy to bring larger quantities of rescued produce to food deserts and areas of greatest need across Kansas City.

In July 2023, ATH will host its second annual signature event – the Amaizing Sweet Corn Glean-A-Thon & Festival, in partnership with the National Agricultural Center & Hall of Fame. The 2023 event builds on the success of the first-ever Amaizing Sweet Corn Glean-A-Thon & Festival in 2022, in which 13 volunteer teams helped them harvest 51,708 ears of sweet corn for donating to local agencies serving hungry people. ATH is still seeking volunteer teams and corporate sponsors to participate this July, and help them harvest hope, one ear at a time. (More information is available here.)

Older Than You Think

The word gleaning is a term that staffers at ATH use regularly. But it’s not a buzz word coined by the relatively new food banking industry. Food banking is a recent philanthropic activity – and not what ATH does.  The concept of food banking was developed by John van Hengel in Phoenix, Arizona, in the late 1960s. Van Hengel, a retired businessman, established St. Mary’s Food Bank as the nation’s first food gathering operations of its kind. In its initial year, van Hengel and his volunteers distributed 275,000 pounds of food to people in need. Word of the food bank’s success quickly spread, and states began to take note. By 1977, food banks were established in 18 cities across the country.

As the number of food banks increased, van Hengel created a national organization for them. In 1979 he established Second Harvest, which was later called America’s Second Harvest, the Nation’s Food Bank Network. In 2008, the network changed its name to Feeding America to reflect its mission. Today, Feeding America is the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization—a powerful and efficient network of food charities nationwide.  As the coronavirus pandemic brought record unemployment and instability, the Feeding America network rose to meet the need. Last year, the Feeding America network served 5.2 billion meals.

But here’s the rest of the story, as radio broadcast icon Paul Harvey might tell it.  The word gleaning is not only older than the youthful concept of food banks; it is older than Moses. It is mentioned in the Bible in Leviticus 19:9 (circa 1040 BC): "When you reap the harvest of your land, you are not to reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You must not strip your vineyard bare or gather its fallen grapes. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner."