Be fruitful
Inspired by Agnès Varda’s documentary The Gleaners and I, April Lee and Chetan Mangat decided to do something about all the mangoes they saw decomposing in Oahu yards back in 2007. The result is [GoGlean.org], an “online forum for people to share their fruit with their neighbors and the greater community.”
“Varda goes through the history of gleaning in France and what it looks like now,” says Lee. “All over Europe, gleaners would come after the harvest, it helps farmers.” The founders want that to happen in Hawaii and beyond.
Lee is an artist (you may have seen her drawings at the thirtyninehotel exhibition Portraiture Revisited in 2007 and her textile designs on Fighting Eel fabrics) and worked at the Honolulu Academy of Arts as a curator of special projects. The Oahu native is now enrolled in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Mangat hails from New Delhi and is now a new media designer based in Brooklyn. His company Blank & Co. counts hypercool The Reed Space and Zing magazine as clients. He’s also just launched his own project, [TheLabelMakers.org], which aims to create transparency in the design of food labels through community participation.
GoGlean works like Craigslist–you create an account and start listing your surplus food. There aren’t many now, but the duo hope to see it soon sprout with available bounty around the world. Right now, if you happen to be heading to Bahia, Brazil, you’ll know from GoGlean that you can get free seasonal tropical fruit from sustainable farm Fazenda Armengue or that there are apples growing wild near a self-storage facility in Cambridge, Mass.
Mangat is in talks with New York farmers to get back to the original gleaning concept, and away from the “freegan” dumpster-diving model. Either way, he and Lee underscore that they “want the producers to be the community. It doesn’t exist without participants.” Quick, someone e-mail the link to MAO Farm.
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