Food is free if you know where to look | Hacker News Reader

Food is free if you know where to look

fallingfruit.org

161 pointseldfgl91 comments

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.

I wasn’t sure whether this was the group, but based in your comment I think it is.

I browsed through their Portland map at length and was disappointed to see how many listings there were in private property where the commenters were clearly not the owners.

This is trespassing, and theft. My landlord years back planted an Asian pear and I don’t think she ever got a single piece of fruit because someone cleared the whole tree two years running. It was by the porch, up a decent flight of steps, not on the sidewalk.

Don’t be an asshole. Don’t do this, and don’t put up with people inciting others to theft.

If you notice a neighbor isn’t picking their fruit at all, talk to City Fruit or a similar group, and they will approach them about getting permission to glean. Then everybody wins, including the local food bank.

Yup, anybody could have free fruits without the hassles of buying the trees, chopping it and buying the correct variety for their climate three years later, spending hours pruning, good money paying for water, disease treatments and garden accessories; and then waiting for 3-10 years. Just trash other's property with the help of technology!.

You can complete your diet with free pizza and candies in the same street if you bring your own brick; Don't forget to take a free plasma TV for the return to home.

My approach would be to put a sign on the tree - “Tree has been treated with pesticides, fruit is not safe to eat”.

This is a reason i don’t eat random fruit off of trees. Pests are a big problem with fruit trees and I have no idea if it was just sprayed yesterday.

This seems to be a good website to advertise for trained dogs :)

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.

That sounds less about your fruit trees or your truck, and more about your trashy neighbors looking at you as lower status, perhaps because you were a renter, or childless, or the way you look.

I don't think it was that, to me, it sounds like much the same entitlement thinking that is sweeping most of the developed world these days.

"Aren't I entitled to your stuff? Aren't I entitled to have everything done my way? How dare you try to do things your way with your stuff?"

I saw a post on NextDoor where a woman was complaining that a retired couple had asked her not to let her dog poop on their yard. She expected them to put up a fence to keep her dog out. Apparently being asked was not only not enough but also an affront. She called them “entitled” because they drove a Mercedes and had a house.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Someone who went out of their way to ask permission from their landlord, before letting kids in to pick fruit, might well be a modern day Mr. Rogers.

Not at all, it was more that the tree didn’t belong to me so I made sure the landlord was aware of the kids’ request, and that’s when he told me the previous tenant and he had allowed it. I was mostly worried about liability (kid falls and the parents sue me).

No, it was pretty straightforward “hey I told you guys you could pick plums but I never said you could climb on my truck. Now it’s dented and I’ll have to fix it, so I’m not going to let you pick plums anymore”. I mean it was nearly 20 years ago so that’s paraphrasing, but that’s the tone I used.

Yeah, I'm with you. I can believe parents being upset and irrational, but it seems odd that the landlord sided with them. There is information missing from this recounting of events.

This is insane. I can't imagine my kids going into someone's private property, climbing on their car, and then somehow defending them.

Do people not teach their kids manners anymore? Or the idea that you aren't the center of the world? Or that when you touch, climb, etc someone else's property, you always ask first, and if the answer is no, then so be it?

When I was a kid growing up in the same town (different neighborhood), we would play hide and seek and similar games in the back yards of all the houses on our street except the one couple who didn’t have kids and asked us not to. We had no problem respecting their property, as we had plenty of other yards to play in.

I think it was mostly a “how dare this stranger tell our kids what to do” situation as the previous renter had apparently never had issues with the kids in his yard. I didn’t either until they damaged my truck, and I didn’t expect that kind of reaction from the parents. It sucked but it was a good life lesson.

I recall a reasonably similar incident when I was a kid, where we were taking fruit, with permission, from a farmer's trees and setting up a little roadside table to sell it from. We damaged his fence and he told us to screw off. I ran home and complained to my father, who said, "Yeah, that's not right at all, I'll talk to him." I thought I was golden and that mean old guy was gonna get what was coming to him. It was only the next morning when my dad sent me back off to that farm that I learned he wasn't telling the farmer off, he was telling the farmer we'd be back to work the fields for a day to pay him back for being little shits.

And your dad did you a huge solid in the long-run.

A free repair estimate from a body shop could have easily been over a couple thousand dollars. Even if you weren't seeking compensation, the quantified proof of damages can go a long way towards helping other adults realize that you were not just being a prick about it. I wonder how the landlord would have felt about covering that repair bill if you agreed to let the kids back into your yard?

It's somewhat amusing when you rediscover the tragedy of the commons and the idea of scarcity by providing free access to your fruit tree.

There is some problem beyond tragedy of the commons, though. There are some people who seem to gratuitously trash things which are free even when it costs them little to nothing. They'll break branches to get free fruit. They'll stomp through a flowerbed instead of walking 5 feet around. They'll consider anything else they find laying around to also be free.

I put a tv on craigslist for free. I take every offer in the order it arrives and communicate with everyone. The 2nd person (within 30 minutes of posting) is unhappy that I'm waiting to confirm with the first and swears up and down at me. I've found that free listings really bring out the nutjobs.

You could try their feedback email [0], but it looks like most of the data is being sourced from other datasets, so your problem likely lies with one of them.

[0] feedback@fallingfruit.org

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.

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?

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

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!

I'm so lost; what is your point?

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"

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

If Hacker News is anything to go buy, running "optimally" is a scam.

But, you have to pay the taxi/train/Uber to go to every event across the city, right?

I use a bicycle but I'd only do this if I enjoy it anyway, otherwise you're just paying with your time instead of money which is actually a worse deal.

Not OP, but as a student I had a free public transport card which made it feasible. Now that I have to pay €18 for a return ticket to Amsterdam plus the hour wasted on travel it wouldn't make sense to go for free pizza.

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

Check out Rob Greenfield if you haven't: 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.

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

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

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

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.

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

Thank you. Would like pick up some Bärlauch.

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."

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

> Wir gendern nicht

That's great. Wish others would do polls like that too.

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

[1] https://fallingfruit.org/docs/David%20Craft%20-%20Urban%20Fo...

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.

I’m sure they have to worry about damage to the trees as well.

In the UK there are farms that let you go round picking strawberries or other fruits. And people pay for the experience. I'm not sure that regulations come in to it.

Sue for what? It's not labour if the farmer doesn't get anything.

Plus, lawsuits for trivial stuff are not common outside the USA.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,...

At least some trees seem to be marked with:

> This source is private but may overhang public land. Pick with discretion.

But I also wouldn't be surprised if some cities spray trees on public land.

I picked some wild brambles yesterday.

Later, at home, I did wash them before eating them in a darkened room.

Hey, what's that moving in my bowl — a small worm. I just removed it and carried on.

I'm more concerned about contamination by heavy metals from car exhaust and other pollutants. The metals like nickel, cadmium and lead end up in the soil and then in the fruits and you can't wash it away. Not sure about fruit trees but I know it's a concern for tomatoes grown in urban context.

https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/topics/topic/metals-contaminan...

We were foraging for blackberries along a popular walking trail once, and an older man gave me a bit of advice I'll never forget: don't pick the lower ones- thems the ones dogs pee on.

As opposed to the higher ones, which get peed upon by humans?

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

Well, at least they smell edible.

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.

Once extracted from the cones, the pine nuts (seeds) are quite delicious.

Aren't those the trees steaks grow on?

I was directed to a live oak tree. Tasty!

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.

Low fruit does carry that risk.

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

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

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

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

Tell that to every grocery store.

...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.

yeah its not free exactly, its not being policed.

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