Friday, August 8, 2014

glean II

I just put a book review up over at Escape Into Life, and about halfway through, I realized that the book under discussion is a book about gleaning. The French illustrator Barroux came across a box amid a pile of things that some movers were hauling out to throw away. In the box was a journal and a French war medal. The result of that chance find was the graphic novel (On Les Aura!), which became Line of Fire in English.


I just thought this was all a great bit of propaganda for gleaning. Read all about it HERE. It's kind of funny that all the gleaning I've been coming across lately has been happening in France.

5 comments:

  1. I think of gleaning, which I suspect most people know from the story of Ruth and Naomi, and then I think of the story I read a few years ago that stores were donating less food to shelters and the like because increasingly efficient methods of distribution made it possible to sell the nicked and pinged goods to dollar stores, so they could get at least some money for it.

    What to make of this, I am unsure.

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  2. One of the things from the movie 'The Gleaners and I', which was the catalyst for my previous post on glean, is that machine harvesting has left enormous amounts of 'imperfect' produce to rot in the fields, unless someone happens to be around to glean it. It was rather shocking to see it actually, even if you already know there is waste in industrial style farming. I wouldn't have thought it was so true in France. The Central Valley here would probably hold few surprises.

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  4. I'm surprised that some bright young entrepreneur has not thought of a way to make money off that imperfect produce.

    I also saw a post somewhere recently about s French supermarket that offered discounts on imperfect, odd-looking but perfectly edible produce that had previously gone to waste, and that it built a big advertising campaign around this.

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  5. Well, the film is from 2000, but maybe they have now. I kind of doubt it, though. There seems to be a lot of waste in all our enterprises.

    I did happen to go to the Banff Film Festival when it came to town this year, and there was a film about these two Norwegian young guys who decide to camp by the ocean in dark Norwegian winter so that they can surf and ski. Anyway, since they really didn't have any money, or at least had made some commitment not to use it, you could see them taking expired food off the Norwegian shelfs. Apparently, this is quite common in Norway and the merchants are all for it. It did look strange to American eyes, though. The film is here. Apparently it was a festival winner.

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