A Fruit Tree that (Could) Grow in Brooklyn

Inner City Fruit

In big cities without the abundance of Northwest fruit trees, getting fresh produce to people with low income is even more of a challenge. The Philadelphia Orchard Project is trying to solve this problem by planting orchards in abandoned city lots. The hope is that residents will eventually be able to tend the orchards and pick the fruit themselves.

There are currently around 40,000 vacant lots in Philadelphia, according to Domenic Vitiello, president of the Philadelphia Orchard Project and professor of urban planning at the University of Pennsylvania. He says that the large number of vacant lots is due in large part to the loss of manufacturing jobs that has caused an outflux of people from the area over the last 50 years. While he doesn’t necessarily think every one of those abandoned lots should become an orchard, he says many of them could produce fruit for years to come. In the last 18 months the group has planted close to 100 trees.

Vitiello says that getting fruit trees growing in Philadelphia’s inner city is especially important for food security and public health. He calls inner city Philadelphia a “food desert” where people lack access to fresh, healthy food. And as a result the rate of diabetes and other diet-related diseases run high. “People that live in the inner city have access to pizza and McDonald’s and other food that your mother doesn’t want you to eat,” he says, but not fresh food.

Urban Fruit and Art Collide

In Los Angeles, an experiment is underway that is one part art, one part social activism and one part culinary adventure. Rather than recruiting volunteers to pick fruit and donate it, a group of three artists calling themselves Fallen Fruit have mapped out the “public fruit” available in several Los Angeles neighborhoods. They are exploiting an old city law that allows people to pick fruit hanging over a fence and into the street.

The project started out as a way to help homeless people find the available fruit, but the artists soon realized that homeless people already knew where it was. So they moved from a more practical project to something more symbolic. “Our artwork is about provocation but in a playful way,” says Matias Viegener, one of the artists.

Now, Viegener and his compatriots lead early evening tours around Los Angeles neighborhoods, showing people where they can find the public fruit and how best to pick it. Their tours have a slightly tongue-in-cheek quality about them, with the artists dressing in remotely official-looking hard hats and coveralls. “We do the tours at night because of the strangeness of walking and harvesting in the evening, and also so we can meet the owners of fruit trees,” adds Viegener.

Building Community

Viegener says the point of the tours is get people to rethink the way that a community functions. Often the people on tours and the owners of the sidewalk-straddling fruit trees get to know each other. In the past owners have gone as far as to invite the tour, which has numbered up to 80 people, into the backyard. “It’s a question of private property and public space and the relationships between them,” says Viegener about his project.

To encourage community interaction the group also holds “public jams” (pun intended) in empty art galleries where people can get together and make jam using homegrown and publicly obtained fruit. “It’s about collaboration and community. People can negotiate over the ingredients—one person has lemons, the other has figs, and they might decide to make a lemon-fig jam,” says Viegener.

Community building seems to be an important part of the other harvesting projects as well, and volunteers often see their projects as something more than just producing food for the community. Katy Kolker, who started a harvesting project in Portland, Oregon called the Portland Fruit Tree Project, says that there is a community and education component to it as well. “It’s about creating an alternative where people can get food by connecting with neighbors,” says Kolker. “People say, ‘Oh my god, I can grow my own food!'”

This “urban fruit” trend seems to show no sign of slowing down. In the cities that have these programs the demand for volunteer harvesters often exceeds the supply. Most of the organizers, often volunteers themselves, say that a lack of government funding is the major obstacle to increasing the size of their operations. To get more people involved, most projects are trying to decentralize and encourage more neighborhoods to do their own harvesting.

And what about obtaining some harvested fruit from my neighborhood in Brooklyn? Well, I don’t know of many fruit trees that grow around here. But if Philadelphia is any indication, there could definitely be more of them (especially on the corner lot that’s been empty for the last year and growing an astoundingly productive forest of shoulder-high weeds).

And as far as I could find out, there aren’t any maps or tours that would help me to locate some public fruit, even if it does exist here. So I guess if I want to live the life of a locavore, I will have to pony up some cash for local fruit or simply toss the notion aside and content myself with the pears that followed me from the Northwest.

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