Combining two wrongs to make two rights: Mitigating food insecurity and food waste through gleaning operations

•The practice of gleaning simultaneously alleviates food insecurity and reduces food waste.•We develop a model to optimize the gleaning schedule to maximize the volume of excess crops rescued.•We characterize the process dynamics of a gleaning operation and identify the process bottlenecks.•We identify conditions where policy interventions are most effective for scaling up gleaning programs.