Urban Foraging: The Super-Local Revolution
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Those lucky Californians. No matter what time of year, they can be pretty confident that something is in season. And imagine knocking on a stranger’s door, asking for their spare apples and plums, or dates, or herbs, and getting a bounty that would otherwise go to waste. And imagine that person being grateful, like you’re the one doing them the favor.
Meanwhile, in Vermont, we’re hip deep in snow and slushy mud, and the only thing growing in my neighbors’ yards is icicles. Can you tell I’m bitterly jealous?
From The San Francisco Chronicle:
Wadud, a bartender at Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse, has become obsessed with saving city-grown fruit from being wasted, which is why she heads out in the darkness, stripping smallish green orbs from the branches of this unassuming tree rooted in a patch of grass between the street and a concrete wall.
She’s also part of a growing movement of super-local eaters and activists interested in food not from the nearest farm, but from down the block. When she moved to south Berkeley four years ago from Ohio, she was struck by California’s ubiquitous fruit and by the way people let it rot, as if backyard apples and figs were something unremarkable.
She gathered the courage to knock on strangers’ doors and ask whether she might try one of their ripe plums, or sample a pear. No one refused; in fact, she says, people seemed relieved to share, as if the prospect of wasted food were a constant weight she was helping to lift.
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So last spring, she created Forage Oakland, a blog on which she details her foraging adventures and where people can barter their excess backyard bounty, trading apples for figs and lemons for lavender.
The response has been enthusiastic - more than 120 people have registered, and now she spends her free time bicycling through East Bay neighborhoods, harvesting at one home and delivering to another. Wadud doesn’t pick anything without asking for permission - difficult at first for a born introvert. But now, the moments she spends with strangers and neighbors in their backyards, trying to thread a long-handled picker through tree branches to reach the highest-hanging fruit, are tiny revolutions against the anomie that is so common in urban life.
“People can live somewhere for years and never really know who’s next door,” she says. “But food binds us all, and it becomes this very simple way to connect.”
As food prices rise and interest in locally grown food intensifies, foraging has also become an inexpensive way to eat healthfully.
Between May and October of last year, the 27-year-old didn’t buy any fruit from the grocery store or farmers’ market. By then, she had made a map of forageable food sources in her neighborhood in south Berkeley.
“Making dinner, I’d check the map to find rosemary for the roast chicken,” she says. “Or if I wanted tea, I’d go over to Miles and Cavour (streets) and get lemon verbena. It’s more exciting to eat when you have this immediate connection with your food.”
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