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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

The only reason why we don't plant tons of edible fruit trees in city parks is because they would make a huge mess and attract rodents. But now that we're going to have self-driving robots that can clean up after the trees by the time they're old enough to produce fruit, there really isn't any reason why our park trees shouldn't be producing food for us.

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The local parks I where I lived in Germany had apple and plum trees. In spite of the fact that all the fruit came in a short time in autumn, I never saw a fully ripe fruit on the trees, let alone a rotten one fall.

Between people and birds, there was nothing left for the rats.

> ...there really isn't any reason why our park trees shouldn't be producing food for us.

The article does address that notion -- trees are really good at capturing pollution, and a good amount of that pollution ends up in their fruit. Which sucks. I grew up foraging urban food, and I'll still pick and eat berries and stonefruits because they're too delicious to pass up, but it seems irresponsible for governments to promote such a thing.

> The article does address that notion -- trees are really good at capturing pollution, and a good amount of that pollution ends up in their fruit.

Right, you wouldn't be able to do this with street trees for that reason, but park trees are fine. The soil just needs to be tested on a regular basis for heavy metals, but that isn't especially difficult; e.g. this has already been done for a lot of community gardens in NYC. While fruit definitely contains whatever pollution is in the environment, unlike many mushrooms it generally doesn't hyper concentrate it.

> trees are really good at capturing pollution, and a good amount of that pollution ends up in their fruit

Must admit that this is a good reason against.

> because they would make a huge mess and attract rodents

So what? more for cats. This is just a cultural excuse. We don't need to do what is more easy or convenient for the gardener or every public space would be under a layer of green concrete now.

> there really isn't any reason why our park trees shouldn't be producing food for us.

exact

For what it's worth, this is quite literally a textbook example of the tragedy of the commons. Fruit will always be picked unripe, for if it is left to ripen, whoever chooses to leave it will have none.

As long as there are is enforcement to prevent people from harvesting stuff to sell, there would always be more food than people. E.g. in NYC there are something like 30,000 acres of parks, so you could have literally hundreds of acres landscaped with edible species without meaningfully reducing other forms of public space.

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