[Lapg] Food Banks Finding Aid in Bounty of Backyard

[Diana Liu]

A wonderful article as people in the communities get together.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Kindness in words creates confidence.
Kindness in thinking creates profoundness.
Kindness in giving creates love.
                                   - Lao Tzu  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/14harvest.html?ref=todayspaper
September 14, 2008


Food Banks Finding Aid in Bounty of Backyard


By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

  


 
	 
BERKELEY, Calif. — Natasha
Boissier did not expect an epiphany while pushing her baby’s stroller
exhaustedly around the neighborhood. But eyeing her neighbors’ yards,
Ms. Boissier began noticing the abundance of fruit trees — and how much
of their succulent bounty wound up on the ground.
“There was all this fruit going to waste,” she said of the apples,
pears and plums in her midst. “It seemed like such a natural way to
deal with hunger.”

 Thus was born North Berkeley Harvest, part of a small but expanding
movement of backyard urban gleaners — they might be called fruit
philanthropists — who voluntarily harvest surplus fruit and then donate
it to food banks, centers for the elderly and other nonprofit
organizations.
 
 In an era in which fruit canning, drying and preserving are for
many no longer everyday skills, harvesters like Ms. Boissier, a
40-year-old social worker, are bringing a new spin to the concept of
U-Pick-’Em. A renewed emphasis on locally grown organic foods, along
with higher food prices
and increased demand at food banks, has inspired a new generation of
community harvesters to search for solutions in their backyards.

 “Farmers markets are great for those who can afford to spend $2 on
a peach,” said Aviva Furman, 54, whose year-old Community Harvest of
Southwest Seattle also offers canning and pruning classes. “But a huge
percentage of Americans can’t afford the two cups of fruit a day
recommended by the government.”

 The concept of gleaning, or collecting a portion of crops on
farmers’ fields for the needy, before or after harvesting, goes back to
ancient cultures. But it has more recently been taken up by people like
Joni Diserens, a 43-year-old program manager for Hewlett-Packard and
founder of Village Harvest in Silicon Valley. Ms. Diserens uses
sophisticated databases and remote telephone answering systems to track
the group’s 700 or so volunteers, 40 receiving organizations, 1,000
fruit-inundated homeowners and, on a recent Tuesday, 780 sticky pounds
of French prunes.

 They rescue people like Diane Leone, an artist whose property south
of San Jose, Calif., contains some 40 unpicked fruit trees, from bees,
squirrels, the occasional wild boar and other creatures that gorge on
fallen fruit.

“You feel like you’re actually doing something,” Diana Foss, 44, a
former astronomer who is now a stay-at-home mother, said as she was
sorting plums and prunes recently in Ms. Leone’s backyard. “You pick a
piece of fruit and know that someone’s going to eat it.”
 The group’s car pools fan out to places like the Community Services
Agency in Mountain View, which operates a food pantry that serves a
large Russian, Hispanic and Asian population. “Their speed is
astonishing,” said Laura Schuster, the nutrition programs director.
“They’ll call and say, ‘Hey, we’re hitting an orchard in San Jose.’
Then they walk in with 1,000 pounds of plums.”
 
Ms. Schuster added: “We always worry about nutrition. When we get the fresh fruit, we worry less.”

 Over the last decade, organizations like Feeding America, a
nonprofit agency that distributes food to more than 200 food banks
around the country, have introduced more fresh produce to respond to
high rates of poverty and obesity and a lack of access to nutritional
food in low-income neighborhoods. About 18 million pounds of fresh
produce was distributed nationally 10 years ago, said Rick Bella, the
director of food purchasing. This year, that has grown to 150 million
pounds, 30 percent of it donated by corporations and individual farmers.

 But affordability continues to be an issue, Mr. Bella said, which
is where the fruit philanthropists come in. “It’s a shame to say, but a
package of Twinkies per pound costs a lot less than a pound of fresh
apples,” he said. “Backyard gleaners make a difference.”
 Amy Grey, a graphic designer and mother of two in Moscow, Idaho,
became a harvester after inadvertently growing 200 heads of lettuce in
her backyard. “I didn’t know you weren’t supposed to plant the whole
packet of seeds,” Ms. Grey said. “We have friends,” she added, “but we
don’t have that many friends.”

A local food
bank was so receptive that Ms. Grey and several volunteers joined with
a local environmental group before striking out on their own. Her 50 or
so gleaners picked 10,000 pounds of fruit last year, including more
than 2,000 pounds of cherries, despite June snows. “It’s different than
dropping off cans,” Ms. Grey said. “It’s really about tying the
community together.”

 Backyard harvests gleaned for the common good echo the Victory
Gardens of World War II, when mandatory food rationing resulted in
citizen gardens, said Amy Bentley, an associate professor of food
studies at New York University
and the author of “Eating for Victory.” During the war, Dr. Bentley
said, the private yard became “a place of civic obligation.”

Frederick L. Kirschenmann, a fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University
and president of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in
Pocantico Hills, N.Y., said that with increased food costs, “we are
seeing changing attitudes about our food system.”
 
“People are becoming more engaged,” Dr. Kirschenmann said, “whether growing their own food or being part of community efforts.”

 A survey this year by the National Gardening Association predicted
a 10 percent increase in the number of people growing vegetables at
home. “Sticker shock is prompting many folks to grow, if not a produce
department in their backyards, then at least a salad bar,” said Bruce
Butterfield, the research director.
 
 For the St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance in Phoenix, the abundance
means a brigade of citrus volunteers from January through March,
picking 1.4 million pounds of oranges and grapefruit from Sun City and
Surprise. The fruit reaches thousands of people, from those at domestic
violence shelters in Tempe to those on the Havasupai Indian Reservation
in the Grand Canyon.

 In Los Angeles, three “social activist” artists who call themselves
Fallen Fruit have mapped neighborhood fruit trees and sponsored public
“fruit jams,” said David Burns, a founder. 
“The L.A. we experience is mostly mediated through windshields and
cellphones,” Mr. Burns said. “So it was surprising to find out how many
fruit trees hang over alleys, sidewalks and parking medians in
neglected corners of the city.”
 
 Ms. Boissier, who grew up on Park Avenue in Manhattan, drives
through the Berkeley hills in a Toyota hybrid loaded with apples and
ladders, helping out homeowners unable to keep up the pie-baking pace,
even with convection ovens, and relieving them of the guilt of waste.
 
 In the bustling kitchen of the Bay Area Rescue Mission in Richmond,
Calif., a shelter serving more than 800 people a day, the apples would
soon be transformed into pancake toppings, apple butter, cider and
cobblers.
 
 Roy Hunderson, homeless for four years, prepares meals in the
kitchen. “The fresher the fruit, the better it is,” Mr. Hunderson said.
“If I had a backyard with fruit going, I’d bring it here too.”









-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.permaculture-guilds.org/pipermail/los-angeles-permaculture/attachments/20080914/001b32a6/attachment.html>