
Food is free if you know where to look - eldfgl
https://fallingfruit.org/
======
saboot
I 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.

~~~
morganvachon
Around 2000-2001 I rented a house in the small town where I grew up, and there
was a plum tree in the yard. I mentioned to the landlord that I had been
approached by the neighborhood kids asking if they could harvest from the
tree, and the landlord said he had no problem with it if I didn't mind (that
was his arrangement with the last renter).

Kudos to the kids for asking first, and at first I didn't mind, but they ended
up climbing on my pickup truck parked near the tree (the only place to park
it) and dented the hood and roof in several places. After I showed them the
damage and asked them not to climb on my truck, I had a gaggle of neighborhood
moms beating my door down to tell me how much of a prick I was to forbid their
children from climbing my truck to get to the tree. I ended up having to call
the cops to have them removed.

When the landlord found out I called the cops on them, he took their side and
asked me to find another place to live (I wasn't under a lease, it was a month
to month rental agreement).

I'm a homeowner now, in a house that is not in a neighborhood specifically so
I can avoid incidents where people feel they have a right to invade my space
and damage my property. Again, I'd have no problem if I had a fruit tree in my
yard today and people walking past wanted to get a bite to eat as long as they
are courteous about it, but mob mentality is not something I'm comfortable
with.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Sounds like half the story. It'd be interesting to hear the other half.

~~~
morganvachon
I’m not sure what you’re getting at, that is what happened. The only thing to
add is that a few years later I noticed the house had been torn down and all
the trees and bushes cleared off the lot. I have no idea of the circumstances
surrounding that.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I'm just guessing the talk with the kids might have gone a little different
than what was recounted. Sounds all rational and even-tempered. Perhaps some
scolding or yelling was involved. We always remember ourselves as being
perfectly polite in recounting stories.

~~~
LanceH
Some parents are ready to fight you if you merely talk to their kids. Even
more if you touch them -- like when you take away the chef's knife from the
unattended five year old waving it around in the store.

Also, if a story was miscommunicated I imagine it was the kids talking to
their parents: "Everything was normal until this old guy flipped out." They
probably never mentioned the dented hood and by the time the parents get over
there they had already made up their minds.

~~~
AstralStorm
As a strategy against these kind of kids and people, I recommend bypassing. Do
not talk to the kids. Take pictures, go to the parents directly.

------
Dowwie
Before 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
There'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?

~~~
catmanjan
how would you feel if someone stole your car? that is private property

~~~
tasuki
Oh 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
I'm so lost; what is your point?

~~~
sova
I'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"

~~~
AKrumbach
Also not in this thread until now, but two thoughts:

First: A car can be "the means of production", if you're a driver for
Uber/Lyft.

Second: the issue I understand is that this website isn't letting _one_ person
take fruit from a tree, but treating all such things as open invitations for
_all_ persons to take from the tree. To your analogy, that isn't taking a
single Model T car, but seizing the factory and stating you're making cars for
the entire city with it.

~~~
sova
One could argue that if the City needs Model Ts and you're not doing anything
useful with the factory, one should reprimand it to benefit society

------
aphextron
Someone 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
Terrible 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
Many 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
I 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.

------
shireboy
It lists a virginia creeper in my area. Which has poisonous berries and can
cause skin irritation...

------
spodek
Check 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.

------
vallismortis
Sarnia, Ontario has an entry labeled "Dumpster (edible)". It sounds like
something you'd encounter in Nethack.

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acak
OMG 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)

------
marble-drink
I always wonder why projects like this don't use OpenStreetMap. Public (and
private) fruit sources could actually be added to OSM itself.

~~~
sct202
Especially 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.

------
zufallsheld
There's also [https://mundraub.org/map](https://mundraub.org/map), a map that
shows free fruits (mainly in Germany).

~~~
softwarelimits
Unfortunately 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
You omitted this part of the quote: " Wir duzen dich als mundräuber oder
mundräuberin. Unsere Geschäftspartner aus Kommunen und Unternehmen siezen
wir."

------
MegaDeKay
The "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%20Fo...](https://fallingfruit.org/docs/David%20Craft%20-%20Urban%20Foraging.pdf)

------
angarg12
Today 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.

~~~
lhorie
On 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.

------
eldfgl
I 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.

------
0xcafecafe
There 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.

------
baalimago
Swedes will hate this app. Don't you dare take my secret mushroom spots!

~~~
Alterlife
Seriously though if somebody _else_ posted your secret mushroom spot on the
map, it wasn't a secret to start with.

------
lerpoel
In 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.

------
EvRev
Super cool project! I was interested in something similar!! Glad to see they
open sourced the data as well!!!

------
Talyen42
Apparently not, I live in a metropolitan area of >1m people and there are just
countless markers for "Dumpster (non-edible)" spanning the map.

------
hollerith
I'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
Yeah, 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.

------
camjohnson26
Got 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
Who 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
Ah, 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,...

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phnofive
I was directed to a pair of ponderosa pine trees. Yum!

~~~
_delirium
I 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.

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decebalus1
Interesting 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
Low fruit does carry that risk.

------
hartator
Ironic that you have to pay $3.99 for the iOS app.

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ericls
Food is always free. We pay for human labor not food itself.

~~~
refurb
Not really. If an owner owns tree he spends no labor on, the fruit still has
value.

~~~
OrgNet
you still have to pick them and find buyers, usually (which is labor)

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moomin
...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
yeah its not free exactly, its not being policed.

