It was too much of a good thing that brought a dozen volunteers to Wild Roots Farm in Troutdale, Oregon, on a blue-sky day in the middle of August. As the sun rose over the farm’s 1.5 acres, the volunteers began to harvest surplus basil, tomatoes, and zucchini.
Each crop had its own unique reason for being left in the field. More basil had flourished than could be sold; the tomatoes showed minor blossom-end rot from summer rain; and the zucchini was, by restaurant standards, oversize. For the farmer, it would have been more work than it was worth to harvest.
Not so for the gleaners.
Urban Gleaners, a Portland-based nonprofit, hosts weekly harvests at this farm. It then makes the surplus produce—plus excess food collected from supermarkets, restaurants, universities, corporate campuses, and event sites—accessible to community members through 47 distribution points, including 24 free-food markets throughout the city.
“We want our free-food markets to feel like a normal shopping experience at a grocery store or farmers’ market,” said Katy Hill, who began working with Urban Gleaners as a volunteer almost four years ago and now serves as its communications and development manager. “We want to serve these people with dignity and give them the power of choice.”
Nineteen years since their founding, Urban Gleaners now rescues about 1.2 million pounds of food per year and serves around 8,500 people per week—all with just one warehouse, 14 employees, and roughly 100 volunteers.
Longtime gleaning operations—including Urban Gleaners, Food Forward in Los Angeles, and Second Harvest Heartland in the Midwest—are finding themselves especially relevant to their communities. About 31 percent of the food supply—almost 74 million tons of food—goes unsold or unused each year. At the same time, 13.5 percent of the population—47.4 million people—live in food-insecure households, according to the most recent food-security report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). (The Trump administration has terminated all future food-security reports, which are used to inform food policy decisions.)
The issue of food insecurity is poised to worsen. The One Big Beautiful Bill, which passed in July, included cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) that will result in about 2.7 million people losing benefits over the next several years. As a result of the recent federal government shutdown, many who rely on SNAP for food assistance will likely experience delays in receiving benefits that could last into December.
Beyond its social harm, food waste has a negative environmental impact. In 2023, the U.S. food surplus produced 230 million metric tons of greenhouse gases—the annual equivalent of driving 54 million cars—and wasted 16.2 trillion gallons of water, enough for everyone in the U.S. to have seven showers a day for a year.
According to the National Gleaning Project (NGP), 341 gleaning operations throughout the U.S. are working to mitigate these harms. The project’s founder, Laurie Beyranevand, who also serves as the director for the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law and Graduate School, created the NGP to provide legal and policy support to gleaners.
“The goal for gleaning organizations is that they don’t exist—that, ultimately, people have enough food and that the food is being distributed in a way that’s equitable and accessible,” Beyranevand said. Until then, helping gather and redistribute food is “a nice way to give back, to build community, and to get to know farmers in your area.”
An Age-Old Tradition
Gleaning is a universal practice with ancient roots. Early references can be found in the Bible’s Leviticus, where the Lord encourages harvesters not to reap the edges of their fields but to leave them “for the poor and foreigner residing among you.”
Jean-François Millet’s 1857 painting “The Gleaners” offers a traditional representation, showing three peasant women bent over, gathering stalks of wheat left after a harvest. The Agnès Varda documentary “The Gleaners and I,” released in 2000 and inspired by Millet’s painting, immortalizes the practice as a feature of French culture and includes the more modern act of gleaning on city streets after farmers’ markets.
In the U.S., gleaning has also evolved with changes to the food system. What likely began centuries ago as an informal, occasional activity on farmlands has become a formalized venture that intersects with food supply chains. While some folks continue to glean the old-fashioned way—harvesting agricultural surplus by hand from the fields—gleaning can also take the form of regularly collecting crates of produce from wholesale warehouses.
Despite its long history, gleaning has not been well documented. It is, in essence, the management of leftovers, and the practice ebbs and flows according to the needs of a community and the yields of the land.
In her work with the NGP, Beyranevand helps organizations understand their rights and protections under federal law, especially through the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act, which was signed into law in 1996.
“A lot of gleaning organizations are pretty small, and they rely on food donations,” Beyranevand said. “When we first started, they had a lot of questions about liability, and they were concerned about food safety issues and how some of those things might impact them, but they didn’t have the capacity or resources to answer legal questions or hire an attorney.”
The NPG is funded by the USDA’s National Agricultural Library, which experienced budget cuts earlier this year. At this time, changes to funding have not affected the NPG or its principal project: a map created to help gleaners connect with each other.
Meanwhile, gleaners across the country are helping communities cope with heightened food insecurity.
In Portland, Innovative Distribution with Urban Gleaners
Urban Gleaners started in Portland as a grassroots effort in 2006 when its founders realized that hunger was often more about distribution than access. Their first partnership for food distribution was with an elementary school in a typically underserved area of the city.
“The motive was to provide nutritious food to kids and their families experiencing food insecurity,” said Haris Kuljancic, executive director of Urban Gleaners. “Our goal was to bring the food directly to their community.”
Today, the rising cost of food is a major factor contributing to food insecurity in Portland, Kuljancic said. The cost of groceries has risen 29 percent since 2020, and 53 percent of Americans cite grocery expenses as a significant source of stress.
The pandemic was a turning point for Urban Gleaners. Since its founding, the organization had distributed gleaned foods to free-food markets, but in 2020, many of their partners did not have the capacity to run the markets, as their own resources were stretched thin. Urban Gleaners stepped up to take over the markets with their own staff and volunteers.
Set up in schools, city parks, community centers, and low-income housing complexes, these farmers’-market-style venues allow people to choose from a selection of gleaned food items, which might include collard greens, grapes, milk, meat, or even garlic bread. Occasionally fresh flowers are available, too, “to share some extra joy,” Hill said. Since 2024, the Portland Bureau of Transportation has made 200 transit passes available to those who need help reaching the markets.
Five years after the launch of the free markets, supply chain issues continue to disrupt the globalized food system, and U.S. tariffs on imported goods, plus cuts to federal food assistance, have put healthy food out of reach for many. In the past two years, Urban Gleaners has noticed a 25 percent increase in participation at free-food markets.
There’s another factor involved, too: “SNAP has become more difficult to access,” Hill said. “There’s a demographic of people who make just enough money not to be able to access it, and sometimes they’re struggling the most.”
Understanding this, the organization has a “no-questions-asked” policy—unlike at some food pantries, they do not require proof of income or forms of identification.
In Southern California, Food Forward Scales Up
Since its founding in 2009, Food Forward in Los Angeles has adapted to meet the needs of its Southern California community. The nonprofit focuses on fresh produce, gathering over a hundred varieties annually by partnering with small local farmers as well as major growers like Dole and Chiquita.
“A lot of our relationships in the old days used to just be with some well-meaning individual who worked on the docks,” said Rick Nahmias, Food Forward’s founder and CEO. “Now we’re working with CEOs and chief sustainability officers because Big Produce understands food loss of any kind is not good for anyone. They understand the environmental impact, the economic impact, and they all want their food to end up on the table of someone.”
With the help of volunteers, Food Forward also continues to glean in a more traditional, small-scale way through their backyard harvest and farmers’ market programs. While gleaning at the farmers’ markets, volunteers collect and redistribute unsold produce that, in some cases, would otherwise be composted. They also work with the folks running market stands to file tax documents for the donations.
The organization has changed significantly since Civil Eats featured it in 2019. “That year—2019 into 2020—that was the tipping point for the organization,” Nahmias said. The organization opened an 8,000-square-foot warehouse facility called the Produce Pit Stop just months before COVID reached L.A., which expanded access to refrigeration and loading docks and proved vital in addressing the sudden spike in local food insecurity.
With the help of the new facility, Food Forward has grown rapidly over the last five years and now supplies food to people in L.A. County, 12 adjacent counties, and six adjacent states, including tribal lands. At this time, Food Forward recovers and distributes enough fresh produce to feed a quarter of a million people every day of the week.
As of September 2025, the organization had recovered more than 500 million pounds of food, an achievement that was formally recognized by the L.A. City Council.
“The irony of California, especially the Los Angeles area, is that we have more food flow through this region than any place else on the continent,” Nahmias said. “At the same time, we have 25 percent of our households experiencing food insecurity. What is wrong with this picture? It was shameful five years ago, and it’s shameful now.”
Making gleaned food accessible to all members of a community has always been challenging, but recent ICE raids have created further complications, Nahmias said. “People are afraid to show up for distributions.”
As a result, the team has begun to occasionally distribute food in unmarked areas to people in need. “Whatever it takes, we’re there to support them, and we will continue to do so.”
In the Midwest, Culturally Diverse Foods From Second Harvest Heartland
Serving 59 counties in Minnesota and Wisconsin, Second Harvest Heartland acts as both a food bank and food recovery service, offering ingredients from grocery outlets and produce from 122 local farms.
“Farming is a big part of the community here, and being able to have partners in that realm is vital to our work and our mission,” said Zach Nugent, senior media relations manager at Second Harvest, which was founded in 1971 and is based in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. “Many people think of food banks as giving out canned goods and government cheese, but that’s really changed over the years.” Produce and proteins are the two most requested types of foods.
The Twin Cities metro area is home to large East African and Hmong populations and growing Korean and Vietnamese populations, Nugent said. “We’re able to work with growers who specialize in the types of produce that those neighbors really seek out.”
Second Harvest sources 21 varieties of produce they identify as “culturally connected”—ingredients that are “traditionally asked for by different communities throughout our region,” such as rare peppers, Nugent said. As a practice and priority, sourcing these specialty items is “something that came into focus early on during the pandemic.”
This specialized attention reflects the organization’s dedication to serving its community in a way that not only meets its nutritional needs but also aligns with its cultural values and heritage.
“We did a statewide hunger study last year and found that one in five households throughout Minnesota are food insecure,” Nugent said. “If you look then at households with seniors and households with children, that goes up to one in four households. And racial disparities are significant across the state; 40 percent of households of color are food insecure compared to 16 percent of white households.”
Minnesotans made nearly 9 million food pantry visits in 2024, breaking records for the fourth consecutive year.
“We do expect that need to continue growing in the year ahead, and with cuts to SNAP and other federal nutrition programs coupled with the continued rising prices of groceries [and] utilities, we are expecting another record-breaking year,” Nugent said.
‘There’s No Calvary Coming’
Amonth after the start of the government shutdown, the USDA suspended funding to the SNAP program—a first since its inception six decades ago. Although the shutdown has ended, many SNAP participants will experience delays in receiving their benefits.
“At a time when the cost of groceries continues to go up, SNAP makes the difference between having enough and going hungry,” said Elizabeth Steiner, the Oregon state treasurer, on an October 23rd press call.
Urban Gleaners relies largely on local support, including through fundraising events like their annual Summer Supper, where the city’s chefs prepare dishes and drinks using 90 percent gleaned ingredients.
“We don’t get any direct federal funding, so we were not directly affected by the freezes—and that was done intentionally,” Hill said. “With that being said, we’re very much being affected in this trickle-down effect. So many organizations that we work with felt the impact from those freezes. It’s adding more people into the local grant pool, so there’s more competition and either the same amount or less money to go around.”
At Food Forward, where the financial plan is created about six months in advance, the team took a “conservative approach on penciling in any federal dollars in this year’s budget,” Nahmias said.
About two years back, under President Joe Biden, there was a huge public push to fight hunger, Nahmias said. “Sadly, we’ve done a 180. There’s no nice way to say it, but we have completely seen any support for the work we’re doing evaporate in 2025.”
Second Harvest Heartland has to navigate a relatively short growing season and relies on charitable donations around the winter holidays for support during the cold months.
“Year-end giving is especially important in the nonprofit world,” Nugent said. At Second Harvest, about 68 percent of funding comes from in-kind food donations and about 18 percent comes from private contributions. About 12 percent comes from program services they offer, including a FoodRx program, funded by non-government grants, that provides medically tailored food boxes and nutrition education to individuals who have a chronic illness and face food insecurity. Two percent comes from government contracts, mostly in the form of donated food.
“Hunger is a solvable issue,” Nugent said. “But it’s one that’s going to take all of us at the table together.”
Beyranevand encourages people to volunteer with their local gleaning operations. It’s an easy—even enjoyable—way to have an immediate positive impact, she said, adding that most organizations have a newsletter or social media account facilitating signups to glean at nearby farms.
Given the present reality, efforts to alleviate hunger in America will have to be community driven, Nahmias said. “There’s no cavalry coming this time,” he said. “We’re going to have to sort this out ourselves.”