Food Podcast: Gleaning yields fresh corn for Pittsburgh food bank

On this episode of the Food Podcast presented by Clearview Federal Credit Union, Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank takes the show on the road with an episode at Harvest Valley Farms in Gibsonia.

On Monday, more than 20 food bank staff members and volunteers took up an offer from Art King, who runs Harvest Valley Farms, to pick extra corn in the fields.

“There’s always corn out there that we say isn’t sellable. It’s certainly edible, but it’s just not perfect. So that’s what the gleaning process does. It comes in and gets that stuff that’s leftover in the field after I get what I can sell,” said King.

Rescuing this leftover food on farms is called gleaning.

Lori Diefenbacher runs the gleaning program for the food bank and works to save fresh food from between 12 to 20 farms in the food bank’s service area.

“We have relationships with these farms, and they call me and they’ll say, ‘Hey, we have these fields. We can’t sell the products that are in the fields but it’s all perfectly good. It’s delicious. It’s fresh.’ Then I go and round up volunteers and we work for three hours in the field, and we harvest all the plants that otherwise would’ve been tilled back into the soil,” said Diefenbacher.

In the two fields already harvested for sellable corn, King estimated there was about 80 dozen ears of corn left in the field that would have gone to waste without the partnership with the food bank.

All of the extra corn was brought back to the food bank to distribute to people across the region.

Diefenbacher said she expects to do about three more food rescue gleans in the coming weeks.

To learn more about the visit to the farm and the food bank’s gleaning program, visit pittsburghfoodbank.org.

Listen: The food bank works with local farmers to rescue produce