Windfall : Volunteers Sweep Harvested Fields to Glean Leftover Fruit and Vegetables for the Needy

Only his legs were visible, perched precariously atop a ladder. The rest of him was swallowed up in the mass of green leaves.

Finally, Howard Steed emerged from the branches. Sweat dripped from the bandanna around his head. His shoulders drooped from the weight of two canvas bags bulging with oranges.

“I’m going to keep picking until I fill my truck or I fall out of the tree, whichever comes first.”

As he has for the past three years, Steed, 58, of Santa Ana was taking time off from his machine shop job to toil in the fields. When his battered green pickup was loaded, he would personally distribute the fruits of his labor to senior citizens in Costa Mesa and people living on the streets in Santa Ana.

On this sweltering Saturday morning in a San Juan Capistrano orange grove, Steed was joined by more than 75 other volunteers who also came to harvest for the needy a crop that would otherwise have rotted on the ground.

The gleaners were organized by Judy Williams, executive director of Sunshine Outreach, an Orange County group that this year will harvest and distribute about 500,000 pounds of cauliflower, tomatoes, corn, oranges, limes, avocados, potatoes, peaches, apples, plums, kumquats, lemons, grapefruit and peppers to feed the homeless and hungry of Orange County.

“But that’s nothing, really,” said Williams, 41, of Mission Viejo.

“There’s 8,000 acres of farmland in Orange County, and we get to maybe 200 to 300 acres. There’s asparagus wasting on the Irvine Ranch. Other places there are avocados, beans and peppers. Waste really ticks me off.”

Six years ago, Williams owned a company that helped businesses barter goods and services with one another. “But I was looking for something else to do that would be of more service to people,” Williams said.

She read about a woman who ran a gleaning program in Everett, Wash. She went to see for herself. On her return to Orange County, Williams asked farmers to donate some of their crops and asked friends to harvest. In 1983, Sunshine Outreach was born.

“I don’t believe you have to do good works to get to heaven, but I hate to see us wasting what God gave us. And I’ve always wanted to help people. So, I saw this as a way to put not wasting together with helping people.”

Three weeks ago, Williams, a mother of three, quit her job as an office manager for a construction company to work full time as the unpaid boss of the gleaning operation.

“I’ve always been a free spirit--you know, a child of the ‘60s.”

Sunshine Outreach has grown steadily. The mailing list of volunteers numbers 2,600 people. A booth at this year’s Orange County Fair netted 600 new names, Williams said.

The nonprofit group operates on a yearly budget of about $25,000, all of which comes from private donations.

The volunteer gleaners are “people who are really wanting to do something to help,” Williams said. “Some are involved in food distribution. Some just love to work out in the air and have a love for the earth. A lot of health-and-fitness people come out.”

Throughout the year, as new crops ripen, volunteers are notified of harvests.

The food picked by the volunteers is funneled to about 70 charitable organizations throughout Orange County, such as Share Our Selves in Costa Mesa, and the Salvation Army and Episcopal Service Alliance, both in Santa Ana. Some volunteers, such as Howard Steed, take it on themselves to distribute food.

About 380,000 people in Orange County--or 17% of the county’s population--are at risk of going hungry at some time each year, according to the state Department of Economic Opportunity.

Most of the food is gleaned from the fields and groves of about 10 large growers, but the group will harvest even a lone, back-yard fruit tree. “I’ve got a list of people who can go at any time,” Williams said.

Many of the volunteers are involved with churches, Williams said--not surprising, given gleaning’s biblical roots.

In the Old Testament book of Leviticus, the Hebrews are commanded to leave 10% of their crops for the poor and strangers.

“Just think if grocery stores allowed the poor to have 10% of their food,” Williams said. “Be kind of neat, wouldn’t it?”

Gleaning had been tried on a smaller scale in Orange County before, Williams said, but those harvesting crops did so much damage that “a lot of farmers were really against it when I approached them.”

But, she said, she recently signed on four new farms, and “I think they’re seeing now that we do a good job, that we don’t cause any damage. I think we’re getting over that bad reputation.”

Growers usually allow Williams and her gleaners to pick what’s left after commercial crops have been harvested, but occasionally the group is called to harvest commercial crops that would otherwise be wasted.

“Growers are on a tight schedule,” Williams said. “If they have to be in a certain field on a certain date, they will be, even if it means leaving some other crops unpicked. We keep that food from going to waste.”

At the recent orange gleaning, grove owner Gary Hobbs was very pleased by the sight of dozens of people clambering up tree trunks and lugging buckets and milk crates full of oranges between the rows.

For six years, Hobbs, a retired Huntington Beach firefighter, has allowed Sunshine Outreach to harvest the entire crop from his 1 3/4-acre grove on a hillside overlooking San Juan Capistrano. In return, Hobbs gets a tax break for donating the oranges.

“Before, the oranges were falling on the ground and rotting. I think gleaning is a great way to go. I wish Judy got more support from other growers. But now the neighbors want to have their oranges picked too. So that’s good news.”

As Hobbs spoke, a crew that crossed all age, sex, race and income lines labored in the heat to bring in the 34,000-pound Valencia crop.

Rob McInturf backed his flatbed truck into the grove and passed out plastic milk crates for the gleaners to fill. He and his wife, Lynda, lead a group of 18 volunteers who run Living Harvest, a food-sharing center in El Toro.

“We’re smaller than a food bank and larger than a pantry,” he said.

Living Harvest distributes about 12 tons of food to about 1,500 people a week and desperately needs the fresh produce obtained through gleaning.

“We’ll pick three or four tons of oranges and they’ll be gone by Tuesday,” said McInturf, 45, of Mission Viejo, who is on disability leave from his job as a supermarket clerk. Much of the food the group distributes is canned, so “people really get excited about fresh fruits and vegetables.”

Mary Hennessy feeds the needy on a smaller scale but depends to some degree on Sunshine Outreach.

Every Sunday afternoon, she and others from a group of 20 volunteers cook and serve a meal for up to 300 people in Garden Grove’s Pioneer Park. “Mostly, we buy the food ourselves, so we’ll take back as many oranges as we can get in the car,” Hennessy, 47, a county government secretary, said as she lugged a partially filled bucket off to the next tree.

Francisca Aguinaga, 36, of Santa Ana usually works seven days a week as a machinist but had a day off while her factory got a new roof. So she came gleaning.

“A guy at work told me about it, but I could never come before because I’m always working. But this is great, doing something for somebody else,” said Aguinaga, who has seven children.

Aguinaga said she was picking some oranges for the Living Harvest food program but would take others to her Santa Ana neighborhood and to family members in Tijuana.

Christina Sexton, 23, a college student from Mission Viejo, stopped picking for a moment to brush off her arms. “Too many ants,” she said.

Niko Theris, 61, of Laguna Beach was gleaning for the first time and liked it.

“All this would go to waste, and there are quite a few needy people in Laguna Beach,” said Theris, a retired X-ray service manager.

“All of Orange County is not affluent, despite the Ritz-Carlton. I think there are a lot of silent people in the county who feel as the people who are here today feel.”

Ruth Van Well, 35, a single mother of two, was picking oranges for her neighbors.

“I live in low-income housing in Irvine, so we’ll take them back and pass them out to senior citizens and some other people who can’t get out,” she said.

Van Well said that gleaning teaches her two children not only about charity, but about the sources of food.

“What I like is that the kids find out that things don’t come from a grocery store, they come from nature.”

Jennifer Toole, 13, president of the youth group at Orange Coast Free Methodist Church in Costa Mesa, seemed to be having a good time catching oranges tossed by her tree-climbing compatriots and was well versed on the fine points of picking.

“They told us if the stem comes off when you pick it, you have to eat it right away or it will go bad.”

But she was a little fuzzy on why she was there.

“It’s for charity, I guess,” said Jennifer of Laguna Niguel.

Bob Kessener, 35, of Laguna Beach knew exactly why he came to the grove.

“I needed something to do to help people out. It’s been a while since I’ve done anything, and this came along at the right time,” he said, smiling beneath the wide brim of a straw hat.

As he helped his son, Daniel, 5, wrestle an orange free from a stubborn stem, he said: “I’m an industrial engineer at Ford Aerospace, and my job is not nearly as fulfilling as this.”