Stuffed bags of trash dumped in the big metal cans my grandfather lifted and hauled down the back stairs to be placed in the bins were understood to be unusable. Garbage. Stacked hardback and paperback books and magazines held together by rubber bands, carpets rolled or folded, toasters and crock pots with cords carefully wrapped around them, and freshly laundered and folded curtains were wrapped in paper bags and placed just to the side of the trash cans. Usually a note attached to the re-usable items started with “please…” or a neighbor stepped out on her porch to say “hello, Mr. Priestley” and point to what was “still good.”

Transported usable chairs, drapes, or tablecloths from the convent or the rectory adorned rooms, windows, and tables throughout the community.

Need to repair a cranky refrigerator? Call my grandfather. A stubborn car? My father. My mother’s croqueted dollies “fancied” end tables and dressers while the meat my father brought home on Fridays from the meatpacking company was, by evening, seasoned New Orleans-, Mississippi- or Georgia-style in other homes.

These migrants from the South arrived in Chicago before and during the Great Depression. My grandparents from New Orleans saw the birth of their second child, my mother, in November 1929. Factory workers, meat packing workers (like my father), truck drivers, elementary school teachers, maids, and janitors (like my grandfather) - all considered themselves a community of people for whom the other, the neighbor, was family.

Those were the days of prosperity and wealth because re-usable items did not go to waste and most important, not one person’s skilled labor or creative ingenuity went to waste for lack of a “license” or “degree.” Those were the days before our desire to integrate consumed our community and our integrity, before we became individuals ripe for the picking by others with dubious intentions. Goodwill and the necessities of life flowed from one person to another. Thoughtfulness was a virtue. Poverty was unacceptable, and shame was foolish and unnecessary. To trash or destroy something that someone else could use would have been un-neighborly. Mean-spirited! To drift into individualism was akin to atrophy of the mind. “Lost!”

***

At harvest time in parts of Europe, the growers take their share of Earth’s abundance. Workers pick grapes, strawberries, apples, oranges and gather potatoes and wheat. When the last of the workers has left the field, the old and young, the office worker and nurse, and the poor and middle class arrive.

“Gypsies come from miles around. People who once held jobs and find themselves unemployed, come to the fields.”

“There’s no shame.”

What the growers cannot use is still usable, eatable, and there is not anything about gleaning in this Old World tradition that is shameful. To glean is to recognize nature as the giver of life, a provider of substance.

A gleaner is one who gleans. Gleaning as a communal practice is becoming extinct but “stooping has not vanished from our sated society…Urban and rural gleaners all stoop to pick up.”

The eighty-three-year-old, Belgium-born, French filmmaker and former gleaner, Agnes Varda, “dropped the ears of wheat and picked up” a “small digital camera” to take the viewer and fellow passenger from one French town to another in search of myriad ways in which gleaners glean. Some viewers will come to recognize a history, a beginning, and even glean ideas, possibilities.

Volunteer servers at Good Heart Charity Meals glean in the potato fields in order “to help people in dire straits.”

Restaurant chiefs glean. A “born gleaner,” France’s youngest “inventive and thrifty” chief, Edouard Loubet, gleans for his special sauces and for apples to “make good spirits.” Why buy refrigerated fruits from Italy!

The camcorder in Varda’s hand documents the survival of possibilities as she and we the viewers pass refrigerated trucks on our way from one field to another. She intersperse her travelogue with images, for example, of the French Realist Jules Breton’s painting, Women Gleaning while the film in my mind recalls the fields I pass over where the world’s first peoples gleaned.

In the cities, citizens of all ethnicity and classes, glean. When stores change their shelves, the people come to glean over “good food” - food sometimes just a day or two past their expiration dates.

It is shameful when food is allowed to rot!

But one store owner Varda interviews thinks otherwise. He is a man who believes he is adhering to the law! He pitches bleach on the food placed behind his store! Why, she asks. The young children and young adults behind the store are “trespassing on private property.”

Where does this mean-spiritedness come from? Where is his shame?

For the most part, store owners do reserve food just past expiration dates for all comers. The law in France looks favorably on gleaning: If the food is no longer “owned” by anyone, declares one judge, then the people are free to glean!

“Salvaging is a matter of ethics,” says one man, a gleaner of “almost 100% of his food in the last 10 years.” He has a salary but finds it “unacceptable to waste.” We live, he continues, in an “over consumer society [and] this proves we are headed for a disaster.” He considers his gleaning a form of activism. Resistance to greed and consumerism!

Poubelle, ma belle! “Trash is beautiful!” It is not just a slogan but also a campaign aimed at educating young children to sort out the usable from the un-usable. In the process, the children learn to be creative! Mobiles and collages made of odds and ends hang decoratively in their classrooms. And why not! Why venture to a high-priced school supply store? Besides, what is the difference between the children’s exhibition of mobiles created from odds and ends and the American artist Sze’s exhibition of mobiles made of “lots of bits from kitchen trash” at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris, except that Sze’s “junk [is] high prized and high priced”!

The shapes of objects are simple, says one artist, and sometimes the same, but “possible variations are infinite.”

The “homeless” are collectors of objects themselves. While gleaning for food behind the markets, they also collect discarded but usable stoves in which to cook the food they share among other “homeless” members in the community. But discarded scrap, too, becomes the foundation of artfully designed shelters.

In the cities, the “homeless” are not alone in their inventiveness and thriftiness. Some urban gleaners collect items to build “totem towers.” Others are amateur artists gleaning for scraps to create collages. Loading up means retrieving objects people leave behind their homes or apartments. At night, Varda shows us, some citizens, couples, students, individuals, drive while others walk through the alleyways in search of the usable including televisions, irons, stoves, refrigerators, dishes, sofas, and paintings.

On one night, while we the viewer are witnesses, Varda finds the remains of a glass clock. It is missing its hands. But she picks it up. Later, at home, we see the clock sitting on her mantelpiece between two porcelain cats.

Gleaning, Varda implies, can be understood more broadly as a form of resistance, a way of refusing to be boxed in by conventional expectations; as such, it demands that we re-learn age-old skills as well as supply individual creativity and initiative…we’ve missed the point if we consider creative achievement and practical survival to be entirely separate (Jake Wilson, “Trash and Treasure,” Senses of Cinema).

What shame is there in “stooping” as a “form of resistance”? But what a shame it is to accept the existence of genetically modified food as natural and strangling the fruitful production of farmers. What a shame it is to purchase, in blissful ignorance, clothes, household appliances, electronic gadgets produced with global labor paid cheaply while corporate executives receive millions in bonuses. What a shame it is to be complicit in the destruction of Earth’s natural resources. What a shame it is to foster atrophy of the mind.

And here I am among the gleaned bookcases, at my gleaned desk, wondering why in the home of the brave, gleaning is left to those labeled the “unfortunate,” the “homeless” when, given the determination of corporate empire, we are all the “unfortunate,” except those in ownership of the majority of the world’s wealth. Why it is in the U.S. that the community most marginalized and stigmatized is yet the one population, a growing population, relying on its inventiveness and thriftiness? Why are other communities, even communities of the economically poor, living the nightmare of a consumer-driven society, still cling to the mythical American Dream? Have we not traveled for too long and too far off course down this increasingly narrow road? The sign up ahead reads: Dead End!

Are there not whole communities, masses of others with open eyes, brave enough, as the film Gleaners and I asks, to “re-learn age-old skills” and “creatively” resist before it becomes impossible to turn back and re-capture what we have lost?

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.