Whole Life Times: Fruits of Your Neighbor

September 2005 | Feature

Fruits of Your Neighbor

Help Yourself to Whatever’s Hanging Over the Fence

by Stephen Krcmar

Just steps away from the bright streetlights of Sunset Boulevard in Silverlake, a crew of about 30 people is winding its way up Edgecliffe Drive into the darkness of the early evening. A few carry flashlights and intermittently scan the trees hanging overhead.

One woman stands out: wearing a black jacket and red hoodie, she’s armed with her own fruit picker, a glorified lacrosse stick complete with telescoping pole. She’s part of a small but growing group—the urban forager. More gatherer than hunter, these folks—representing a broad mix of ages and occupations—pick whatever fruit they can from land that isn’t their own.

Here in the Golden State, they’re not doing anything illegal. California law stipulates that any fruit tree that grows on or over public land is not the sole property of the owner. That lemon or avocado tree that hangs over the sidewalk? Its bounty is public.

Matias Viegener is on edge this evening. He hopes their search is fruitful enough to help feed all of these people. “We’ve never done this before,” confesses Viegener. “We’re a bit nervous.”

The “we” he’s referring to is Fallen Fruit, a group started by Viegener and two friends—artistic collaborators with a goal that goes way beyond afternoon snacks. Fallen Fruit hopes to help people to look at their neighborhoods in a new way, to think about the haves and the have-nots, and to make a difference to the 400,000 LA households that experience “food insecurity.”

How are they hoping to achieve such lofty goals? They started by identifying all the public fruit in their Silverlake neighborhood and creating a map indicating where the organic goodies could be found. The map’s legend identifies 12 different fruits. They’ve posted the map on the web and are poised to distribute printouts around town.

But Viegener is so unsure of what they’ll find on this excursion that he’s brought along four bags of pre-picked fruit—he doesn’t want any angry foragers on his hands. No one else seems to be stressed, though; the sweet smell of jasmine that hangs in the evening air is delicious, and the mood is festive. One forager exults, “We’re taking back the fruit!”

Tonight’s searchers are all new faces to Fallen Fruit’s co-founders. Most heard about the event from various list-serves or from Temporary Services, a Chicago-based arts organization that is hosting this event. Although nearly every car that passes slows to check out the ragtag group, there’s not an auto in sight when they have their initial fruit sighting: loquats.

Eager hands grab the low-hanging, oval-shaped fruits and start passing them out. “These are perfect!” exclaims Dave Burns, another of the co-founders, along with Austin Young. “They’re not even blemished.” The scavengers immediately dive into the tangy, distant relatives to the apple.

It’s appropriate that their first find is a loquat—it was common as a small-fruited ornamental in California in the 1870s, according to The California Rare Fruit Growers. A few years later, the edible version became more popular.

As a boy in Argentina, Viegener had grown up around fruit trees and never understood why no one was eating their bounty. When he learned that the oranges he coveted were sour and inedible, like the ornamentals in LA, he was perplexed as to why anyone would plant fruit that you couldn’t eat, especially considering the extensive numbers of hungry poor.

Viegener, now a professor at CalArts and a writer, comes across as the most ambitious and idealistic of Fallen Fruit’s three founders. He hopes the group’s efforts will plant a seed that will blossom into a full blown trend, inspiring communities from coast to coast to map their neighborhoods, meet their neighbors and share the experience of food gathering.

During the past few months, Fallen Fruit has managed to plot three more neighborhoods. They’re also planning to go bi-coastal with some friends in Brooklyn, a project they’ve dubbed “Buddy Bag.” Since fruit trees are in short supply in the urban New York borough, they intend to map points in the neighborhood where restaurants, bakeries and grocery stores dispose of day-old goods, in an effort to bring clean and sanitary food to the homeless.

In LA, Fallen Fruit’s greatest challenge has been distributing information to the public. A grassroots project with very little funding (although they just received a Rhizome Grant for $1,200), Fallen Fruit primarily relies on its website, FallenFruit.org and other online sites and newsletters to spread the word, a system that Viegener worries “doesn’t serve the people who need it most.” The group has printed piles of maps to distribute by hand and plans to translate flyers into Spanish—but for the moment, Fallen Fruit is mostly an online project.

At the tail end of the first Fallen Fruit outing, the group is exuberantly foraging another bountiful loquat tree when its owner catches them mid-pluck. Although they know their actions are protected by law, they’re anxious about provoking conflict. But the tree owner just smiles. “It’s fine,” he says. “I grab fruit from my neighbors’ trees all the time.”

Stephen Krcmar first discovered foraging on the night before Mother’s Day in 1980. Even with a bouquet of the best flowers from the neighbors’ yards, his parents had a different word for his actions. They called it trespassing.

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