Falling Fruit

Urban foraging, saving food waste, and bringing communities together is exactly what the innovative and interactive map Falling Fruit is all about.

Ethan Welty and Caleb Phillips set up Falling Fruit in 2013 to invite people around the world to take part in urban foraging. They created it not only to offer access to free foods that might otherwise go to waste, but also to encourage communities to move away from stained sidewalks and reconnect with the botanical origins of food.

The database includes everything from small neighbourhood gardens to large-scale tree inventories, allowing anyone and everyone to check in and easily locate publicly accessible food.

Users can import their gardens (or businesses) into the map or share their organisations via the sharing page. The database currently holds over 1,783,348 locations, helping people discover snacks that need saving from an otherwise inevitable fate.

What an incredible opportunity for people to get involved in their neighbourhoods, and at a time when the economy is... stretched, it’s a great way to save money on fresh fruit, veg, and herbs!

Shop for groceries at the Table Mesa in Boulder, Colorado? Falling Fruit will receive a $1 donation for every $2.50 reusable Fight Hunger bag sold through the month of September.

Student teams from Design for America have partnered with Falling Fruit to help us improve our online platforms and find new directions for the project. They have prepared a user survey, which I encourage you to take a few minutes this week to fill out:

Foraging Survey This 5-10 minute survey will ask about your experiences with foraging. Any information you provide would help Falling Fruit and Design for America identify directions on how we can help build a stronger foraging community. Thank you for your time!

On Saturday, Ethan gave his annual foraging tour in his neighborhood in Zurich, Switzerland. It was a beautiful sunny morning, full of promise of the harvests ahead.

Tour slides updated for 2025: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1X1l-gTvvtVockoNKgyHM676stPJAeUxZzSjQEUGl_fo

"Forageable food are everywhere, you just have to look around. Falling fruit makes it easy to identify what is edible and what is not."

- Jenna Marsh (The Ohio State University - 2023 Commons Ecology course). These images were taken during a foraging walk on October 3 in Delaware, Ohio, where the group found black walnut, butternut, goldenrod, sassafras, and hazelnuts.

This month, Falling Fruit is participating in Hacktoberfest! Register at https://hacktoberfest.com and come help us build the next mobile-friendly Falling Fruit website (https://github.com/falling-fruit/falling-fruit-web). It is built with React and already quite good but has some issues and is still missing some features of the existing website.