Finding Free Fruit and Sharing It With Others

Neighbor, Can You Spare a Plum?
By Kim Severson, New York Times, 2009.06.10 Wed

Fruit trees provide a yearly supply of fresh edibles, and they're found in the oddest places: parks, cities and yards. Sometimes the fruit goes unwanted and unused, left on the ground.

People are paying attention and starting ways to make sure that this bounty isn't going to waste. Neighborhood fruit exchanges and co-ops share and distribute fruit to members, so that someone with an apple tree can trade a portion of their crop for a variety of oranges, pears and limes. Sites like Neighborhood Fruit, VeggieTrader, The Portland Fruit Tree Project and Fallen Fruit cover everything from listings of public fruit to tree-owners who looking to exchange one kind of fruit to another. Some people try to use these opportunities to give back; one woman mentioned in the article invites the needy on her group fruit-picking events. Others donate part or all of their crop to local food banks.

Supporters of this movement hold two basic principles. One, it’s a shame to let fruit go to waste. And two, neighborhood fruit tastes best when it’s free.

“There have always been people harvesting fallen fruit,” Ms. Wadud said, “but there’s a whole new counterculture about gathering and eating public fruit. This tremendous resource is growing everywhere if people just start looking around.”

[from the NYT article]

The article and some of the comments on the article deal with the shadier side of fruit-picking: people who take privately owned fruit without asking (i.e. stealing) and people who do not take fruit from public areas responsibly (leaving nothing for others in a tragedy of the commons).

The websites that I've seen have users mainly on US West Coast cities and Honolulu, though there probably are other efforts around the country that I haven't looked into closely yet.