Duncan Hilchey

IN THIS ISSUE: Gleanings from the Field

ood waste and food rescue have been hot topics in recent years (although gleaning dates back to at least biblical times in the ancient traditions of tzedakah and pe’ah). Our cover photo for this issue, courtesy of Salvation Farms, shows a group of volunteers joining Salvation Farms and two other Vermont Gleaning Collective organizations gleaning a crop of carrots too large and misshapen for market. I first learned of the great work Salvation Farms is doing a couple of years ago from the Food Feed blog (https://learn.uvm.edu/ foodsystemsblog/) of the University of Vermont (a founding partner of JAFSCD). Salvation Farms had just published a report assessing on-farm food loss in Vermont, and I thought its methodology should be peerreviewed and in the applied research literature. I contacted report authors Elana Dean and Salvation Farms director Theresa Snow and suggested they find a scholar who could work with them on a manuscript. They found Roni Neff, a food-waste expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future (coincidentally also a founding partner of JAFSCD). Their collaboration has yielded a seminal work on estimating on-farm food loss. I share this story as a model of food system researchers and professionals collaborating to produce applied research that benefits all parties concerned—and the greater community. We are likely to do a special issue on food waste in the near future, and we hope to see more researcher-professional collaborations like this one. In this open call issue, we give you our spring and summer gleanings from the field and elsewhere in the F

In This Issue: Building Our Airplane While Flying It

First paragraphs: In this issue Catherine Sands and colleagues offer a detailed account of their eight-year effort to simultaneously launch and make adjustments to a food policy council in western Massachusetts while keeping its momentum going. They share the trials and tribulations and lessons learned—including many positive outcomes—in Building an Airplane While Flying It: One Communitys Experience with Community Food Transformation. The challenge of building an airplane while flying it applies to JAFSCD as well. Over the past year we have been working to maintain our quality and volume of published content while switching to a new review and publishing platform at www.FoodSystemsJournal.org . We, too, have had our share of challenges: Amy has been maintaining our old peer review and publishing websites while designing and migrating content, including subscriber records, to the new platform. I’ve been continuing to guide manuscripts through our old peer review system while learning the new system; we began taking submissions there in late September. It has taken many hours of work, but we are now reviewing and publishing new papers in the new system, and all JAFSCD content since our launch in 2010 are on the new site.