Hello glorious gleaners of Kent!
Cauli gosh! We’ve just discovered HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of cabbages and cauliflowers going to waste on a farm in Kent, near Broadstairs! They're going to waste because there's a massive glut of brassica in the UK at the moment, yet supermarkets are still importing them from overseas!
This Sunday 6th December, 10am-5pm (TBC) we’re inviting volunteers to the massive glean to help harvest those tasty brassica and save them from waste, to surprise food poverty charities like FareShare with lovely fresh veg. You can witness the colossal waste first-hand, and have a great social day out for a fantastic cause. Check out some photos of our recent gleans.
Please spread the news of our glorious mission to save the cabbages and caulis to your friends and groups, by sharing this email, or here’s a sharable facebook pic and tweet!
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To join the big brassica glean, please fill in our sign-up sheet or for more info, please contact kent@feedbackglobal.org
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Please get in touch ASAP so we have an idea of numbers. Also, please do check whether you can make it, as lots of drop-outs at the last minute can jeopardise the gleaning day going ahead.
Usually travel expenses can be covered for those travelling from Kent – just check with us first (we generally cover up to £12 per gleaner, so a car with 4 people could be reimbursed up to £48 petrol expenses in total, at a rate of 23p per mile).
If you're receiving this you're already on our gleaning list, but if your friends want to receive emails about future gleaning days, get them to sign up to our gleaning list here.
If you can't join us this time, watch this space – we’ll have lots more gleaning days coming up as harvests come to an end for lots of the wonderful produce here around Kent so keep your eyes peeled for dates and locations where you can join us.
And here's some background about gleaning:
Gleaning is about working with farmers who, for reasons usually beyond their control, have large amounts of healthy, edible food that they cannot harvest and that at risk of going to waste. We step in with our band of volunteers (that's you!) to harvest the food and redistribute it to homelessness and food insecurity causes.
From our start in 2012 to the end of 2014, the Gleaning Network already gleaned over 110 tonnes of produce, equal to well over 1 million portions of fruit and veg, with over 500 volunteers across 56 gleaning days. We’ve launched gleaning hubs in Kent, Cambridgeshire, Sussex, Bristol, London, Worcestershire and the North West, and also around Europe! We also achieved extensive media coverage, including Channel 4's River Cottage, the Independent, BBC Radio 4's Food Programme. You can see some great short videos about us, too - by the Guardian, and Al Jazeera. And in 2014 we were winners of the BBC Food and Farming Award for the Best Initiative in British Food!
All the best!
Martin
Martin Bowman
UK Gleaning Coordinator
T: +44 (0) 2030518633 | M: +44 (0) 78160 88210
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