At the Twilight's Last Gleaning

Leviticus 19:9-10 When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field to its very border, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest...you shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner.

There are two things everyone knows about Prince Edward Island: It's the home of Anne of Green Gables, and it grows an absolute mountain of potatoes every year. This year is no different, of course. But what is different, at least for us, is that we live right behind a potato field. And the harvest is done. So, the boys decided to go on a little trip in the side-by-side, and brought back some goodies...

Actually, that's a lot less than what they brought home today; we filled an entire bin with these potatoes before they picked these ones up. Now, these are not the organic potatoes that we grew ourselves; these are most definitely GMO potatoes. But with the coming winter expected to be much worse than last year, we want all the food we can get. And hey, it was free. Literally sitting on the ground, missed by the harvesters, waiting to rot and turn into compost. What a waste that would be.

Now, there are some people who think 'gleaning' is a bad thing; after all, you're taking something you didn't grow and didn't pay for. Well, that is true, but while stealing is a Bad Thing, gleaning is a direct command from God, with the above passage being only one of the instances where gleaning is allowed and encouraged in the Bible. I'll take that ruling any day of the week. Gleaning is where people who are struggling can make up for some of their misfortunes. We're not exactly poor, but we're not swimming in money, either.

Now, we have enough of these monster-potatoes (and they are huge, believe me) to keep Mark Watney alive until the Ares IV mission arrives. And there's no way we're going to eat them all before they go bad. However, we can and will donate a good chunk of what we got to the needy and the poor, such as at our church and some of the food banks on the island. Hey, it's better than leaving it all to rot.

The fields are very, very generous to humanity; just about everything we eat originates in those fields. And when we plant something, we get a lot more of it back. It's a pretty awesome system, and it's good to give back ourselves.