When we think of wasted food, we tend to picture the wastage happening where consumers and food meet — supermarket inventory deemed too old to sell, restaurant servings too big to finish, groceries that shoppers bring home but never eat, etc.

But a group of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students recently received $2,500 for a project that hopes to head off wastage at the other end of the food distribution network: perfectly good crops that farmers plow under or otherwise dispose of, usually because it’s not cost-effective to bring them to market.

Check it out: The EcoRep team that won the Maine Food System Innovation Challenge displays their prize. From left: ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ sustainability manager Tom Twist, Amelia Keleher ’21, Hermione Zhou ’21, Elliot Wilson ’21, Sabine Ragy ’18, Oaklea Elfstrom ’21, Sophie Landes ’21, professor Francis Eanes, Liv Guion ’21, Domi Frideger ’21. Team members not shown are Madeline McGonagle and Matt Reback, both ’18, and Nelly Junesand ’21. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College)

The Maine Food System Innovation Challenge, a pitch competition in its third year, made the award to the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ team during a weekend gathering Nov. 10–12 at Saint Joseph’s College of Standish, Maine, which hosted the weekend event.

ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ went up against teams from Bowdoin (second place), Colby, Harvard, and Saint Joseph’s colleges. Four private-sector teams competed in a separate “Enterprise” track during the weekend.

The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ concept, dubbed ReHarvest, capitalizes on an emerging phenomenon in the food world: organizations that put together farms and volunteer gleaners — in other words, people willing to pick what farmers call the “lost harvest” — and then distribute the salvaged produce to food banks and similar relief organizations.

As the ReHarvest presenters pointed out in their pitch, Maine is one of the states most affected by food insecurity. One in five Maine children and one in seven adults contend with limited or uncertain food supplies, making the state the most food-insecure in New England and ninth nationally, according to the USDA.

Moreover, much of the food donated to emergency providers is processed food that’s heavy in fat, salt, and preservatives — and much less nourishing than fresh produce, says one of the four ReHarvest presenters, Hermione Zhou ’21 of Shenzhen, China.

With the complementary goals of reducing lost-harvest waste and steering more food to people in need, ReHarvest will be a Web-based tool (and ultimately a mobile app) that streamlines communication among farmers, gleaners, and hunger relief organizations.

“There’s a real need to connect excess food much more effectively with people who need it,” says Francis Eanes, a visiting professor of environmental studies whose research encompasses food systems and who is advising the ReHarvest team.

Eleven ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students are involved in ReHarvest, most of them EcoReps — students who lead and execute projects for the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ sustainability office — and all but three of them first-years.

The Maine Food System Innovation Challenge charges its collegiate participants with envisioning ways to expand supplies of local and sustainably produced foodstuffs, while considering factors like climate change, possible uses of technology, and the need for more transparency in the food supply and distribution chain.

Dandelion Springs Farm in Newcastle, Maine, is the setting as Kennebec County Jail inmates pick lettuce, squash, and bok choy during 2017’s Maine Gleaning Week. The inmates had to qualify for this community service opportunity, and earned time off their sentences for taking part. (Courtesy of Healthy Communities of the Capital Area)

Farmers leave crops in the field for a variety of reasons. Sometimes they overplant a crop as insurance against bad weather. There might not be enough field hands to pick everything. And they often won’t harvest good produce that’s simply not as pretty as consumers expect.

Enter the . Organizations like the Maine Gleaning Network and Central Maine Gleaning Group dispatch volunteers to farms and orchards with crops that owners don’t plan to harvest. (Participants in this year’s Maine Gleaning Week rescued 18,000 pounds of produce, enough to make 75,000 servings.)

The gleaning organizations, in turn, distribute the recovered foodstuffs to food banks and other hunger relief organizations. In Maine, it generally falls to a few dedicated individuals and small nonprofits to coordinate the entire process.

Enter ReHarvest, “a connecting mechanism for farms, gleaners, and emergency food suppliers — something that makes it as efficient and easy as possible to connect people with each other,” says Sophie Landes ’21 of New York City, another of the presenters at the MFSIC.

Farmers could use this online tool to post crop availability, gleaners could align opportunities with their own schedules, and emergency providers could “shop” for crops to fill specific needs.

Some of the 135 pounds of organic peppers gleaned at Andrews Farm in Gardiner, Maine, during the first annual Maine Gleaning Week, Oct. 7–16, 2017. (Courtesy of Healthy Communities of the Capital Area)

The team based their pitch on what they learned from networking and research during the fall. They “really did their homework, and talked to a lot of folks who are doing this work on the ground. That gave a lot of credibility to their pitch,” Eanes says.

Before they can actually develop the web tool, hopefully this spring, the team plans to connect with some 20 farmers in the Lewiston-Auburn area, as well as with gleaning organizations and food-assistance providers. (Maine’s largest such organization, the Good Shepherd Food Bank, is headquartered in Auburn.)

Eanes also plans to assign some of the fieldwork to his “Urban and Regional Food Systems” class this winter. “When they have to get out there and talk to people whose job it is to address those issues on a day-to-day basis, it adds so much depth” to classroom learning that tends to be abstract, he says.

“There was just a lot of energy surrounding innovation in the food industry.”

The challenge was sponsored by the Institute for Local Food Systems Innovation, based at Saint Joseph’s. With the pitch presentations scheduled for Sunday, all the college teams spent a full day Saturday auditioning their pitches for a parade of experts.

Each of those 14 professionals, representing fields from law to banking to high-end groceries to food assistance, consulted with each team for 30 minutes.

“They made us think about the minute details, the mechanics of how everything would happen,” says Domi Frideger ’21 of Durango, Colo. “How are you going to transport the [gleaned] food? How long can you store it legally? What kind of laws are there around this? Are you going to be a nonprofit?”

“It was exhausting, but we learned so much,” says Liv Guion ’21 of Arlington, Mass.

And the peer networking was an added pleasure, Landes notes. “It was a pretty great experience to be with all the students from the other colleges, because there was just a lot of excitement and passion about everyone’s products and just a lot of energy surrounding innovation in the food industry.”

Doug Hubley/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College

If you think of the yearlong ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food initiative as an arch built from many stones, Mark Winne ’72 set the moral keystone in place with a lecture on March 30.

In contrast to burgeoning consumer demand for natural and local foods, he said, low-income Americans have less access than ever to healthy foods. Affluent folks shop for pricey organics at Whole Foods while malnourishment, obesity and related illnesses proliferate in disadvantaged communities whose residents lack access to even reasonably wholesome foods. This is the “food gap” that Winne has fought to bridge for the past 40 years– a disparity between the haves and the have-nots, he said, that “doesn’t just divide the nation, but somehow defines it.”

A sociology major at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, Winne served for 25 years as executive director of the , a nonprofit that developed innovative ways to deliver high-quality and affordable foods to low-income urban families in Connecticut.

Now a resident of Santa Fe, N.M., he writes and consults on food system issues and is the author of (Beacon Press, 2008).

The laid-back Winne (pronounced WIN-ee) shared lessons from his life in food justice in a talk capping a two-day ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ visit sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food Planning Committee.

Winne’s picture of the American food gap wasn’t pretty. The supermarket industry and public transportation policy have left many low-income people in “food deserts” — locations with no ready access to healthy, reasonably priced groceries. The government food-welfare system is biased toward industry interests rather than those of its needy clients, among whom are 32 million food stamp recipients — a record number.

And charitable emergency food providers, such as food banks, often just manage the symptom of food insecurity rather than addressing the disease of poverty.

Winne’s remarks included a list of recommendations for President Obama — whose administration, he later told a student during a question-and-answer period, gives him hope about the prospects for advancing food security — including:

A major government incentive — Winne estimated $1 billion — to encourage the supermarket industry to build stores in “food deserts,” both to improve the food supply for residents and to stimulate the local economy. “We can actually fix this one,” he said;

More money and better administration for school food programs;

And more support for farmers, including funding for farmers markets, CSAs and similar direct-marketing programs. “We’re in danger of running out of farmers,” Winne said.

At ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, “food was not something we contemplated when I was here,” a droll Winne said early in the evening. “The only contemplation I can really remember was the evening when there was kind of a slow arc of a plate of spaghetti, moving skyward across the dining Commons, somehow suspended for several minutes above our heads as it moved toward the far wall, where it eventually landed with a tremendous splat.”

More seriously, Winne explained that as a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student from privileged circumstances, it was in Lewiston where he first encountered poverty. Working as a Big Brother, he visited the Lewiston home of his young charge — a visit that left him with an indelible memory of the child’s apartment, its smell of decrepitude and the way it shook from the looms at the nearby ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Mill.

In Lewiston, too, Winne first took on the social justice work that would define his career. He and other ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students founded a community center to do peer drug and alcohol counseling, then added a breakfast program for children and a food co-op.

Forty years later, Winne shared with the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ audience some precepts distilled from his long experience, a body of experience that spans working a community farm, collaborating with community organizers in Hartford’s poorest neighborhoods and mingling with D.C. power brokers.

A dominant theme was the need to address poverty as a whole, rather than hunger as an isolated phenomenon. “The role of poverty in causing hunger is paramount,” Winne said. We need creative responses to address poverty more than hunger: “We need to pause, reflect, critique and consider what alternatives might exist.”

Winne concluded with a tribute to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and its early leadership in food issues, in terms of both on-campus food service and community food system work.

“We really got started with this earlier than most places,” he said. “I’m very proud to be a ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ie.”

By Doug Hubley

Borealis Breads founder Jim Amaral and food activist-author Mark Winne are among ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College alumni featured during March events relating to the Nourishing Body and Mind: ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food initiative.

All these events are open to the public at no cost.

First on the menu is a lecture about the impacts of globalization on poverty, food security and nutrition by Cornell University professor Per Pinstrup-Andersen at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 2, in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52). The talk is sponsored by the economics department.

Two weeks later, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ alumni involved in food production and nutrition in Maine discuss a variety of issues in a panel presentation at 4:30 p.m. Monday, March 16, also in Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52).

Moderated by Anna Bartel, associate director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, the panel comprises Borealis Breads founder Jim Amaral ’80; Maine farmers Steve Hoad ’72 of Windsor and Nicolas Lindholm ’86 of Penobscot; and Kirsten Walter ’00, director of the . The event is sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food Planning Committee.

Finally, food activist and author ’72, gives a talk titled “Food Justice and Good Food — When Shall the Twain Meet?” at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 30, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St. A reception and book signing follow in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St. This event too is sponsored by the ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food Planning Committee. For more information, please call 207-786-6336.

This academic year, inspired by the opening of a new dining Commons and a $2.5 million gift supporting the use of organic, natural and farm-fresh foods, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ launched Nourishing Body and Mind: ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Contemplates Food. The initiative explores the ramifications of our food choices and spotlights ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ own award-winning sustainable food-service practices.

• Monday, March 16 at 4:30 p.m.
• Pettengill Hall’s Keck Classroom (G52).