What is gleaning?

Gleaning is the act of collecting food crops that would otherwise have gone to waste. we go on to redistribute this food to other organisations such as food banks and pay as you feel cafes.

Why We Glean

There are so many reasons why we glean - not just because it saves tons of food from going to waste. It provides important, nutritious food to organisations that feed the most vulnerable people in our society. A study published by The Food Foundation revealed that in the UK in 2014, more than 8 million people lived in households that struggled to put food on the table, more than half regularly going whole days without eating. This doesn't need to happen when there is perfectly good food available to be gleaned.

Gleaning can help alleviate food poverty whilst helping to tackle the climate crisis by reducing food waste. It is estimated that up to 2.5million tons of food goes to waste in the fields every year. Gleaning is not the solution to farm level food waste, but it can be a vital life line to those most in need of fresh fruit and vegetables in the meantime.

if your a volunteer gleaning is great fun too - it provides valuable volunteering experiences, giving people a sense of purpose and achievement and the opportunity to improve their physical and mental wellbeing. Gleaning provides all of this and more!

Our gleaning programme was funded by Wrap in 2020 and R4GM and SUEZ in 2022. We currently run a few gleans a year and are looking for funders to help our gleaning operation. If you are interested in being part of our mission to stop food waste at farm level, please email us at hello@wearemud.org

one of muds directors, Jo, was north west gleaning coordinator for feedback global for a number of years and this lead to mud taking a lead on the gleaning operations in the north west over lockdown. there are lots of other groups that glean in the north west too so nowadays we leave it up to them.