10 ms·
Food is free if you know where to look
- moomin 7y ago...well that’s pretty offensive framing. Are time and tool acquisition free too? Because frankly you’re going to have trouble eating possum without both. I’m all for kids eating blackberries off wild bushes, but let’s not pretend this is free to anyone except those that can already afford as much food as they need.
- senectus1 7y agoyeah its not free exactly, its not being policed.
- EvRev 7y agoSuper cool project! I was interested in something similar!! Glad to see they open sourced the data as well!!!
- phnofive 7y agoI was directed to a pair of ponderosa pine trees. Yum!
- jackmoore 7y agoWell, at least they smell edible.
- _delirium 7y agoI think you can get pine nuts from the cones of ponderosa pines, which might be why they're included. The tree filter does in general seem over-inclusive regarding how practical getting something edible from the trees is though. The most common trees it turns up near me are sugar maples in parks. They do produce edible maple syrup, but you have to drill taps into them to extract the sap, which is probably not a great idea in a public park.
- sprokolopolis 7y agoOnce extracted from the cones, the pine nuts (seeds) are quite delicious.
- smacktoward 7y agoAren't those the trees steaks grow on?
- Ambele 7y agoI was directed to a live oak tree. Tasty!
- camjohnson26 7y agoGot to say this is an impressively dense map, there's plenty of options within 1 mile of my current location. Seems dangerous to use this info though, who knows what kinds of pesticides are sprayed on those fruit trees for example.
- rmason 7y agoWho goes around spraying apple trees on public land? I'd be far more worried about finding a worm in my apple! I do appreciate the efforts of the team behind this map. Found a strawberry patch only a couple of miles from my place.
- mikro2nd 7y agoAh, no! I'd be happy to find a worm in my apple -- read it as a guarantee that the apple has not been sprayed with pesticides. Finding half a worm, now,...
- quicklime 7y agoAt least some trees seem to be marked with: > This source is private but may overhang public land. Pick with discretion. But I also wouldn't be surprised if some cities spray trees on public land.
- parenthesis 7y agoI picked some wild brambles yesterday. Later, at home, I did wash them before eating them in a darkened room. Hey, what's that moving in my bowl — a small worm. I just removed it and carried on.
- acd10j 7y agoI assume washing fruits thoroughly before eating is always a good idea.
- jobigoud 7y agoI'm more concerned about contamination by heavy metals from car exhaust and other pollutants. The metals like nickel, cadmium and lead end up in the soil and then in the fruits and you can't wash it away. Not sure about fruit trees but I know it's a concern for tomatoes grown in urban context. https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/metals-contaminants-food https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/metals-contaminan...
- aphextron 7y agoSomeone should do this for tech meetups with free pizza and beer. I practically lived on those my first year in the bay area. If you're smart you can eat for free every night of the week in exchange for listening to a few boring lightning talks and recruiter pitches.
- dfeojm-zlib 7y agoTerrible nutrition though, most def not how to run your body optimally. Freeganing can save you bank. Hit up the nicer grocery stores: Whole Foods, Trader Joes, Lunardi's, Nob Hill. Find out their schedules for throwing away perfectly good food because the arbitrary/conservative date on it "expired." One of my friends frequently scores expensive cuts of filet mignon steaks that they just toss (I'm vegetarian when it would increase demand for animal ag). You don't need to waste time pretending to be interested in Meetups. Also, if you go in the back of Starbucks and other chains that serve food, maybe an hour before closing time, you can score healthy vittles. (The give my friend all the black bean burritos and chicken salads he can carry.) Personally, I'd be worried about eating fruit from trees in dense urban areas or near highways due to pollution and also pollution from landscape management (i.e., pesticides).
- pergadad 7y agoMany farms are near polluted places - especially airports and big streets where people wouldn't want to live. So you won't really escape the pollution - but maybe the chance of eating car exhausts is better than the guarantee of eating them. Then again, you don't know what else happened with processed/supermarket food before it reaches you.
- gruez 7y agoI think you have it backwards. The more accurate statement is that farms are everywhere, including near airports and big roads. It's not like farms cluster around major highways or airports. I would even go as far to say that your average farm plant sees less road pollution than a similar plant in a suburban environment.
- acak 7y agoOMG I laid the groundwork for the Falling Fruit mobile app, but I had to step aside and it was all so long ago! It has come along leaps and bounds since then. The browser app has always been way ahead and the programmers behind the whole idea are super competent. https://github.com/falling-fruit/falling-fruit-mobile.git https://github.com/falling-fruit/falling-fruit-mobile.git
- baalimago 7y agoSwedes will hate this app. Don't you dare take my secret mushroom spots!
- Alterlife 7y agoSeriously though if somebody else posted your secret mushroom spot on the map, it wasn't a secret to start with.
- zufallsheld 7y agoThere's also https://mundraub.org/map https://mundraub.org/map, a map that shows free fruits (mainly in Germany).
- iserlohnmage 7y agoThank you. Would like pick up some Bärlauch.
- softwarelimits 7y agoUnfortunately they do not open source their code. Also I found this one: "Wir gendern nicht, weil wir bei der Umerziehung des Menschen durch Sprachmanipulation nicht mitmachen wollen und weil die Mehrheit von euch dies laut Umfrage auch so sieht."
- zufallsheld 7y agoYou omitted this part of the quote: " Wir duzen dich als mundräuber oder mundräuberin. Unsere Geschäftspartner aus Kommunen und Unternehmen siezen wir."
- MagnumOpus 7y ago> Wir gendern nicht That's great. Wish others would do polls like that too.
- saboot 7y agoI see it has listed a fruit tree in my yard... Is there a way to revoke that? I've given permission to my neighbors to pick as long as they knock, not to randoms.
- hinkley 7y agoI wasn’t sure whether this was the group, but based in your comment I think it is. I browsed through their Portland map at length and was disappointed to see how many listings there were in private property where the commenters were clearly not the owners. This is trespassing, and theft. My landlord years back planted an Asian pear and I don’t think she ever got a single piece of fruit because someone cleared the whole tree two years running. It was by the porch, up a decent flight of steps, not on the sidewalk. Don’t be an asshole. Don’t do this, and don’t put up with people inciting others to theft. If you notice a neighbor isn’t picking their fruit at all, talk to City Fruit or a similar group, and they will approach them about getting permission to glean. Then everybody wins, including the local food bank.
- pvaldes 7y agoYup, anybody could have free fruits without the hassles of buying the trees, chopping it and buying the correct variety for their climate three years later, spending hours pruning, good money paying for water, disease treatments and garden accessories; and then waiting for 3-10 years. Just trash other's property with the help of technology!. You can complete your diet with free pizza and candies in the same street if you bring your own brick; Don't forget to take a free plasma TV for the return to home.
- refurb 7y agoMy approach would be to put a sign on the tree - “Tree has been treated with pesticides, fruit is not safe to eat”. This is a reason i don’t eat random fruit off of trees. Pests are a big problem with fruit trees and I have no idea if it was just sprayed yesterday.
- softwarelimits 7y agoThis seems to be a good website to advertise for trained dogs :)
- lerpoel 7y agoIn my city it is full of dumpster diving spots that seems to be imported from trashwiki(?). Three of four fruit trees in a sea of trash compactors, electronic waste disposals and residential trash. I can filter on a specific category but I can't seem to filter "everything but a specific category" to get rid of the freegan stuff.
- Dowwie 7y agoBefore you end up stealing someone's private property, introduce yourself to the property owner and ask for permission. If the property owner changes, you have to go through the process again. Rights aren't grandfathered in. This seems to be beyond what many people are capable of. This app is going to be shut down.
- tasuki 7y agoThere's something about the concept of private property that gets people properly riled up. It's mine, my preciousss! What if you live in a monarchy and all the land and all the trees belong to the king? Do you have moral/ethical right to steal fruit from the king's trees? There are very few private trees around where I am. This app lists a lot of trees in public spaces around me - trees I never gave a second thought before. I'm grateful for it. > This app is going to be shut down. Pray tell more. By whom?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- catmanjan 7y agohow would you feel if someone stole your car? that is private property
- tasuki 7y agoOh of course I'd be upset! (I don't have a car, but will entertain your theoretical scenario.) If someone stole fruit from my tree I'd be upset too!
- asdkhadsj 7y agoI'm so lost; what is your point?
- sova 7y agoI'm not the OP or at all involved in this thread until now, but fruit trees will yield fruit again and again, a car will not. Now, if you owned the means of production for a Model T and I took a Model T, how upset would you be? That's more like "taking an apple" since you own the "tree"
- angarg12 7y agoToday I've read an article about how Spanish farmers let fruit rot on the tree, since prices are so low that they can't cover the cost of labour. Someone asked on the comments why they don't just let people go and grab as much fruit as they want, if it's going to waste anyway. The answer might be 'because regulations'. If you got a farm and people pick up fruit for free, does it count as unpaid labour? Could you get sued? People rather not take the risk. Not to mention the implications of allowing random people to freely roam your property, etc.
- JustSomeNobody 7y agoI’m sure they have to worry about damage to the trees as well.
- ChrisSD 7y agoIn the UK there are farms that let you go round picking strawberries or other fruits. And people pay for the experience. I'm not sure that regulations come in to it.
- JetSpiegel 7y agoSue for what? It's not labour if the farmer doesn't get anything. Plus, lawsuits for trivial stuff are not common outside the USA.
- lhorie 7y agoOn my side of the ocean, people will gladly _pay_ to pick their own fruit (and pay even more to the ice cream stand by the parking lot on their way out). Just google u-pick.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Talyen42 7y agoApparently not, I live in a metropolitan area of >1m people and there are just countless markers for "Dumpster (non-edible)" spanning the map.
- marble-drink 7y agoI always wonder why projects like this don't use OpenStreetMap. Public (and private) fruit sources could actually be added to OSM itself.
- sct202 7y agoEspecially considering the API costs of using Google maps now. I'm assuming they're getting free credits, but the list price per 1k loads is $7 so hopefully they're getting a lot for free.
- spodek 7y agoCheck out Rob Greenfield if you haven't: https://www.youtube.com/user/RobJGreenfield https://www.youtube.com/user/RobJGreenfield. He's living for a year on only food he planted or forages from naturally growing sources. He's in Orlando, Florida. I find him inspirational. I'm now growing tomatoes, herbs, and salad greens in my windowsill and I've foraged several pounds of fruit and herbs from near my home -- and I live in Manhattan! I can't believe how delicious and plentiful they are.
- 0xcafecafe 7y agoThere is a documentary I watched called "dive" a few years back which had a guy feeding his entire family with food he could get from the dumpsters of grocery stores. And it was not just unhealthy stuff. Fruits which were almost ripe like bananas are thrown out. The food wastage gives a good opportunity for free meals if we know where to look.
- shireboy 7y agoIt lists a virginia creeper in my area. Which has poisonous berries and can cause skin irritation...
- vallismortis 7y agoSarnia, Ontario has an entry labeled "Dumpster (edible)". It sounds like something you'd encounter in Nethack.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- decebalus1 7y agoInteresting but (at least in my area) I wouldn't eat anything growing in bushes (like berries). The amount of leashed dogs I see peeing all over them makes me gag just thinking about it.
- eldfgl 7y agoLow fruit does carry that risk.
- MegaDeKay 7y agoThe "About" section [0] of the site has the bio's of the people involved with the project. From there, there is a link to a free download to a 166 page PDF of David Craft's book on Urban Foraging [1]. [0] https://fallingfruit.org/about?c=forager%2Cfreegan&locale=en https://fallingfruit.org/about?c=forager%2Cfreegan&locale=en [1] https://fallingfruit.org/docs/David%20Craft%20-%20Urban%20Foraging.pdf https://fallingfruit.org/docs/David%20Craft%20-%20Urban%20Fo...
- hollerith 7y agoI'm going to be the cynic here and assign a high probability that eventually the insiders running the site will keep the really good spots to themselves, e.g., make it so that information about the really good spots is visible to the user id or IP address that uploaded the information and to the insiders, but not to the general public. In the 1994, the last time I had information about them, the employees of the San Francisco Food Bank felt free to take any of the donations with the result that the clients of the Food Bank got whatever the employees did not want.
- sova 7y agoYeah, that's like "Facebook keeping all the good friends for itself." It's kinda hard to "hide a tree" when they live multiple decades and people can keep independent databases. Not really something worth trying to hide imo. Perhaps technologically feasible on a day-to-day level, but if it were ever discovered, the scandal that would ensue would be disastrous to the whole project. And the whole point is to connect more mouths to more fruits, hoarding is actually counterproductive. That's wild about the Food Bank -- similar things probably happen in general for the "people who keep score for the game tend to have a higher score" thing. I wonder sometimes about the creators of those dating apps, and if they are also skimming top applicants.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- ericls 7y agoFood is always free. We pay for human labor not food itself.
- refurb 7y agoNot really. If an owner owns tree he spends no labor on, the fruit still has value.
- OrgNet 7y agoyou still have to pick them and find buyers, usually (which is labor)
- ilikehurdles 7y agoTell that to every grocery store.
- eldfgl 7y agoI think that 'street fruit' is a great resource. There are many fruit trees in neighborhoods that are under harvested, with piles of 'ground fruit.' I've always played by the rule that if I could reach it from the sidewalk, and it was overflowing, I would take some. For sure though, don't harm the fruit-producing plant, or any property surrounding it, because that's not considerate.
- hartator 7y agoIronic that you have to pay $3.99 for the iOS app.