Free, No Strings Attached Fruit -- For You and Your Community!

Wow. Has anybody noticed the cost of grocery store fruit these days? I don't live in a particularly pricey area but I'm still feeling the sting, so I can just imagine what people on the east and west coast of the country must be coughing up for a couple of apples and oranges. I'm sure that there are plenty of us who just bite the bullet and deal with the rising prices in our produce section, but not everyone among us can follow suit. I've read plenty of online accounts of people who say that they've made extreme cutbacks in the amount of fresh fruits and vegetables that they eat, instead filling in with cheap and plentiful carbylicious snacks. That might be okay on occasion, but it appears that an increasingly larger amount of consumers are purchasing "cheap junk" over nutritious produce on a more regular basis, which could potentially end up being a ticking health time bomb waiting to blow.

The sad thing is that there is a bounty of fruit out there absolutely ripe for the picking, but most people have no idea where and how they can access it. I'm not talking about grocery store stockpiles or farmer stand offerings, either. Many of us don't realize that it will cost the low-low-price of zero dollars...nada dinero...zippo duckets to gain access to this secret oasis of fruit. Aside from hopping in your vehicle, spending a few bucks on gasoline and expending a little personal energy to stretch and pick, you can have your pick (literally) of hundreds of community harvesting programs which will map out the fruit bearing trees in your vicinity that private homeowners are happy to donate to willing pluckers. No need to be suspicious -- this is on the level. If you wonder why they aren't just enjoying the fruit themselves, there could be a number of reasons -- alergies, picky eating habits, too much for just one member in the household, senior citizen, etc.

Fortunately, an increasingly larger number of organizations like Fallen Fruit, Harvest Sacremento, Village Harvest and Neighborhood Fruit (NF) recognize the potential of this often underappreciated food source and are intent on letting no ripe morsel of goodness go to waste. In fact, NF has cleverly joined forces with the San Francisco Urban Forestry Mapping Project and other foraging sites like ForageSF and ForageOakland in order to maximize their public reach. Offering easy-to-navigate databases online, interested participants simply need to see if there is a program in their area and then they can access more fruity goodness than they ever imagined, simply at the click of a mouse. Of course, if you yourself have a food bearing tree (or two) and would like to offer it up to the public, then this would be a perfect opportunity to do so. There are so many additional programs out there that span the entire country, from Mesa, Arizona's United Food Bank which harvests citrus from homeowners' yards for community donations and Florida's Sunshine Coast Fruit Tree Project (SCFTP) which maps the locations of food trees available for community use to the North Berkeley Harvest, which donates what they cull from people's yards to local area non-profit organizations.

In a similar vein, the mission of Stretch Island Fruit Company's Fruit Tree Planting Foundation (FTPF) is to sow edible fruit trees and plants throughout communities across the country. In 2008, they reportedly planted 1,000 fruit trees and shrubs on the grounds of 24 U.S. schools and via their their Fruit Tree 101 project, they intend to seed an estimated 17 additional schools in nine cities with assorted fruit bearing plants and trees in 2009. Interested parties can nominate their own school and if it is selected, the winner will score a fruit tree to plant in their own backyard, too. FTPF is an award-winning international nonprofit charity that strategically plants orchards where the harvest will perpetually serve present and future generations, such as near public schools, in low-income neighborhoods, outside of homeless shelters/drug rehabs, and even near animal sanctuaries. Makes you want to plant your own busting-at-the-seams backyard orchard stat and invite everyone to come on over and go crazy, doesn't it? Can you imagine all of the freebie "thank you pies" you could potentially score? Now there really are no more excuses why you should consider strawberry Pop Tarts one of your five a day!!