Sometimes life gives you lemons, and sometimes it gives you 40,000 pounds of cucumbers — at least if you’re Dawn Barnes, Indiana regional director at Society of St. Andrew. The semi truck load of cucumbers rolled into Barnes’s life on Oct. 5, 2023, after being turned away from a grocery store on the grounds that they weren’t straight enough.
By the end of the day the allegedly-crooked cukes were in cold storage at Midwest food bank waiting to be distributed to hoosiers with whom life has been decidedly stingier with its produce.
“It makes me angry that we as a society have conditioned ourselves that we need to have straight cucumbers,” Barnes said. “It’s both maddening and heart-wrenching.”
“Maddening” because that load of produce is just one of many that are rejected every day across America for cosmetic reasons. All told, roughly 40% of the food grown in this country never actually makes it to the table.
And “heart-wrenching” because one in ten people nationwide isn’t always able to make sure everyone in their household has enough of the food they need. The number in Indiana is similar.
“We have enough food grown in America to feed everybody,” said Barnes. “But it’s a matter of having access to it.”
One way Society of St. Andrew facilitates that access is by diverting rejected loads of produce, like the cucumbers, from landfills to food banks. Another is by organizing volunteers to collect unsold produce from farmers’ fields in order to donate that fresh food to hunger relief agencies.
The act of salvaging what’s left over after the commercial harvest is called gleaning, and the practice of using that second harvest to feed those in need dates back to the old testament.
That’s where Society of St. Andrew, or SoSA, takes its mandate. Founded by Methodist ministers in Virginia, the organization first began distributing salvaged produce in 1983. Today it coordinates a gleaning and food distribution network throughout ten states. Considering the level of food insecurity in Indiana and the amount of food grown here, SoSA opened its Indianapolis office with Barnes at the helm in 2018.
Barnes has spent much of her life thinking about how food gets to people’s plates — or doesn’t. She spent 12 years engaged in community development in southern Africa. She saw a lot of hunger, and worked to support agricultural projects. The challenges she saw there are not the same as those in Indiana, but some of the lessons have stuck with her.
“In Africa, in general, people do not waste food,” she said. “There’s always a way to either recycle it or give it to your neighbor.”
There was a culture of community support, she said. You might be sharing with a neighbor in need today, but tomorrow you could be the one asking for help.
Barnes shares the fruits of her own garden with her neighbors, but the work she does with SoSA is also an extension of that premise.
“It’s not just about the food,” she said. “It’s about making a community.”
She cultivates relationships with farmers, volunteers and food pantries, weaving more direct links into the food system that allow growers to share their bounty with neighbors in need.
There’s a huge disconnect, Barnes said, not only between us and our neighbors but between us and the source of our food. And at every step along the supply chain, edible food is wasted.
Crops go unharvested because of market gluts and labor shortages, or because of cosmetic defects. If a farmer does decide to bring a product to market, they bear the cost of getting it there and risk having it rejected — as in the case of the crooked cucumbers.
A big part of Barnes’ job, as she sees it, is education. She wants people to know that just because a food isn’t picture perfect doesn’t mean it’s not perfectly nutritious, and to instill an appreciation for the farmers and farm-workers who grow and harvest our food.
Having volunteers in the field gleaning, she said, does just that. She recalls watching a five-year-old dig a potato for the first time, learn that it could become french fries, and deliver it directly to a local food pantry.
“It’s really making that connection between where your food is grown and where the need is in the community,” said Barnes. “That’s really what keeps me going.”
It’s also part of how she measures impact.
“You can’t measure relationships in pounds,” she said.
Through October of this year, SoSA reports that they’ve gleaned and distributed 373,923 pounds of food in Indiana. It may sound like a lot but, Barnes admits, “it’s a drop in the bucket.”