No matter who you are, where you live, or what your circumstances are, you have to eat. And increasingly that’s a challenge for a broad swath of America—grocery costs have risen dramatically in recent years, posing a real financial hardship for a lot of people and leading to some questionable solutions.
Incredibly, these high grocery costs exist side by side with enormous levels of food waste—to the tune of 92 billion pounds of food wasted each year. That number includes all the food tossed by stores after its sell-by date, all the food restaurants throw away, and all the food we scrape into the garbage after dinner. But about 16% of food waste in America happens on the farm before it even gets to the consumer.
That’s part of the problem—but also part of the solution. Because if you’re struggling to afford groceries, a gleaning market might be the budget-saving solution you need.
What is “gleaning”?
“Gleaning” is an ancient term (it’s found in the Bible) that refers to scouring farmer’s fields for leftover or missed produce. Gleanings can be food rejected for aesthetic or other reasons or surplus food resulting from over-production—if a farmer miscalculates how big their crop will be and lacks the ability to sell off the extra food, they can allow it to be gleaned and donated. There are numerous federal and state tax incentives to encourage gleaning by farmers, in fact.
Gleaning takes food that would otherwise end up in dumpsters and landfill and makes it available to people in need, either through food banks and other charities or at low-cost markets. This work is mostly done by volunteers organized by nonprofit groups like the National Gleaning Project—people travel to local farms and glean produce left in the fields after mechanical harvesting or in areas that weren’t profitable for the farmer to harvest. If you’re struggling with your grocery bills, finding a gleaning market near you can save you a lot of money—while making your grocery hauls a lot healthier.
Where to glean
Gleaning markets—sometimes called “salvage grocers”—are located in local communities all over the country. In New Jersey, for example, The Foodshed Alliance runs the LocalShare program, which gleans food from local farms, and maintains an app you can use to find gleaning markets and other resources. You can also just do a Google search focused on your area, and the National Gleaning Project maintains a map of gleaning organizations you can use to find local markets. Buy Salvaged Food also offers a map of salvage grocers. A popular online option for gleaned/salvaged food is Misfits Market.
Some gleaning and salvage markets are run like any other grocery store, just with gleaned and salvaged goods for sale—for example, Town Talk Foods in Texas repackages gleaned and salvaged food and sells it at a large discount, but anyone can shop there. Other gleaning markets have a membership-style program with a monthly fee (the fee is often pegged to your income), but then allow you to simply take what you need from the shelves within some basic limits. One person posted on Reddit that their local gleaning market would save them $1,000 every month on groceries for their large family after paying a monthly fee of less than $80.
