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The late great British-American broadcaster Alistair Cooke was an accomplished gleaner of information who often used to begin his ' weekly ' Letter from America ' radio broadcasts with a brief and seemingly free flowing stream of consciousness account of some event or chance encounter he'd had that would gently draw listeners into his unique idiosyncratic take on a particular aspect of political and cultural life in the US or the wider human drama. At the end of the broadcast Cooke would loop back to his opening ramble and we'd instantly understand why. I was reminded of Cooke today when my friend mentioned that she had watched The Gleaners and I a French documentary by Agnes Varda that features the practice of Gleaning. and this sparked an interest as we had previously talked about the role of gleaners within the culture in another context.
The film deals with gleaning in the traditional sense, the collecting of leftover crops or food , I haven't seen the film so cant go into detail except that the human stories of the gleaners are apparently as interesting as their craft.
And gleaning is a craft as I told my friend that her description of the film reminded me of Henry Mayhew's writings on London Labour and the London Poor: in which Mayhew lists the various gleaners and scavengers struggling to make a living amongst the detrius , sewerage and street waste of Victorian London. Mayhew wrote objectively but with much compassion for his impoverished subjects.
Here's an excerpt.
On the Street-Finders or Collectors.
These men, for by far the great majority are men, may be divided, according to the nature of their occupations, into three classes:-- 1. The bone-grubbers and rag-gatherers, who are, indeed, the same individuals, the pure-finders, and the cigar-end and old wood collectors. 2. The dredgermen, the mud-larks, and the sewer-hunters. 3. The dustmen and nightmen, the sweeps and the scavengers. The first class go abroad daily to find in the streets, and carry away with them such things as bones, rags, “pure” (or dogs’--dung), which no one appropriates. These they sell, and on that sale support a wretched life. The second class of people are also as strictly finders; but their industry, or rather their labour, is confined to the river, or to that subterranean city of sewerage unto which the Thames supplies the great outlets. These persons may not be immediately connected with the streets of London but their pursuits are carried on in the open air (if the sewer-air may be so included), and are all, at any rate, outof- door avocations. The third class is distinct from either of these, as the labourers comprised in it are not finders, but collectors or removers of the dirt and filth of our streets and houses, and of the soot of our chimneys. The two first classes also differ from the third in the fact that the sweeps, dustmen, scavengers, &c., are paid (and often large sums) for the removal of the refuse they collect; whereas the bone-grubbers, and mud-larks, and pure-finders, and dredgermen, and sewer-hunters, get for their pains only the value of the articles they gather.(continued)
This type of impoverished gleaning and scavenging still goes on in most big cities in poorer parts of the world where communities have grown up around and live off public rubbish dumps , its unhealthy, dangerous back breaking work and occassionally gangs even fight for control over the dumps and the richest pickings. This is the Smokey Mountain rubbish dump city in Manilla.
"You have to have a dream, and believe that it's not your destiny, that it's not God's will for you to be impoverished like that" Father Ben Beltran, a Catholic priest working with the Smokey Mountain community on a new housing project.
Closer to home we have the dumpster diving and freeganism, political and , at the moment, somewhat trendy responses to our throwaway culture which are routinely championed on youtube .Of course the rural and urban poor have always gleaned and scavenged here too, they have had to, but they never make it into Society features in the Guardian or New York Times . In the UK, Unreality TV ran a Reality TV program about 10 people forced to live off a rubbish dump for three weeks as a sort of 'Waste Idol' competition.
in the US, a charitable organisation called Gleaners set up by a Jesuit brother in Detroit in the 1970's to combat hunger, homelessness and poverty, still collects and distributes food in various places in Michigan. In the age of mass produced food and global hunger we probably all need to learn to glean better rather than just carelessly throwing food or anything that can be recycled away. The web has become a great tool for gleaners as well , people obviously use the net to glean information - its original purpose - but E-bay does a lot of trade in scavenged goods and on Craigs List and similar sites people post junk for free to anyone who wants to collect it. Its a gleaners paradise and people routinely surf to glean free software , resources and discount coupons and other freebies as well . The net is transforming us all into gleaners but Governments and corporations are also increasingly using the net to glean personal information about us and these developments are pretty sinister and need to be resisted as they are gleaning away our rights.
As for Alistair Cooke , well, he made the headlines again post mortem in 2006 when it was discovered that a criminal gang had stolen organ, bone and tissue from hundreds of bodies, including his, in New York funeral parlours and sold them on to legitimate research and medical facilities The gang made up of funeral directors, surgeons and entrepreneurs and led by former dentist Michael Mastromarino gleaned body parts from corpses and sent then on for burial or cremation padded out with newspaper and cheap plastic piping in place of bones. Mastromarino boasted that he could make from $100,000 to $150,000 per body. Its amazing that these bourgeoise pillars of the community could convince themselves that stealing often diseased body parts unfit for human transplantation and recycling and feeding them back into the healthcare system for exactly that was merely gleaning and a respectable way of buying themselves and their families a firmer footing within the American Dream and putting their fresh faced kids through college.. Isnt it ironic that our bodies are worth far more money than most of us will ever have.
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