Gleaning in Kent on Sunday 6th Dec

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

Victoria's Green Matters - 3rd December 2015

Deal With IT's Secretary Victoria Nicholls writes a regular column in the East Kent Mercury:

The plight of the polar bear has been with us ever since we first heard about the loss of sea ice in the Arctic. Global warming is now the most important threat to the survival of this beautiful animal.

A new study by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has found that there is likely to be a 30% decline in our bear population of 26,000 by 2050 due to loss of habitat, which is disappearing more quickly than even climate models predicted.

The polar bear depends on seasonal sea ice from which it can catch its prey of ring seals and bearded seals; after its summer fast it is vital that it replenish its fat stores to prepare for the next breeding season. If there are more than five months free from ice, hunger will spread amongst the bears, leaving them facing starvation and reproductive failure. Global warming could also increase the incidence of disease among the bears’ prey, further emphasising their predicament.

Sea ice in western Hudson Bay, in Canada, has reduced by one day per year over the last thirty years which has also brought the polar bear into conflict with human settlements, such as Churchill. The bears are opportunists, so will scavenge anything, including human rubbish, when they are hungry. Recently, the five polar bear range states – Canada, Greenland, USA, Russia and Norway – agreed an action plan, described as a conservation strategy to safeguard polar bears in the wild. Let’s hope it is successful.

Victoria's Green Matters - 26th November 2015

Deal With IT's Secretary Victoria Nicholls writes a regular column in the East Kent Mercury:

We see many articles written and many reports asking about how the growing population of this planet is going to feed itself in the years to come. There is even talk about us eating insects as a source of protein – how gross is that?

We seem to have little influence over the human population of the world or if we have, it takes a long time for these influences to come to fruition when we can see women able to control their own fertility and so improve their family’s lives.

What we do have influence over and can do something about immediately is the number of animals reared for food in the world. Livestock numbers are increasing by about 2.4% per year – that is twice the number that the human population is increasing.

Raising these animals for food uses three quarters of the world’s agricultural land; a third of our cereal crops are used to feed livestock. Soya is now being grown to feed animals on cleared forest and savannah land in South America leading to more climate change. If we decided to eat the soya rather than the meat produced from animals, the amount of land cleared to supply us with the same amount of protein would reduce by 94%. Livestock farming creates about 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

If we ate less meat, our environmental impact would decrease in line with the incidence of heart disease, strokes, diabetes and cancer – worth thinking about, surely?

Deal Station Garden tidy up

A big thank you to our six volunteers who braved the weather today to give the planters at the Deal Station a good tidy up. There is another session on Monday morning.

Thanks to Jill, Sonja, Roisin, Sarah, Alan and Steve.

We have put a planning session for the garden in 2016 on Sunday 31st January 2016 3:30pm at Sonja's (off London Rd) email Sarah for details at Station@dealwithit.org.uk

Xmas Deal Beach Clean Sunday 6th December

Our final beach clean (our 6th in 2015) will be on Sunday 6th December starting at 10:00am meeting at Deal Pier.

This one will be a pop-up one (we will not be logging the rubbish) and all Santa and Elf hats are welcome (as long as worn responsibly).

Hope to have some drinks and festival cakes

All very welcome