Food banks finding aid in bounty of backyard (IHT)

By Patricia Leigh Brown
Sunday, September 14, 2008
BERKELEY, California: Natasha Boissier did not expect an epiphany while pushing her baby's stroller exhaustedly around the neighborhood. But eyeing her neighbors' yards, 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.
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 like Boissier, a 40-year-old social worker, 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 fruit 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 the Silicon Valley, south of San Francisco. 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, or about 355 kilograms, of French prunes.
They rescue people like Diane Leone, an artist whose property south of San Jose, California, 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 Leone's back yard. "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 nearby 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."
Schuster added: "We always worry about nutrition. When we get the fresh fruit, we worry less."
Over the last decade, organizations like America's Second Harvest, a nonprofit agency that distributes food to 197 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, 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," Grey said. "We have friends," she added, "but we don't have that many friends."
A local food bank was so receptive that 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," 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, Bentley said, the private yard became "a place of civic obligation."
Frederick 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, New York, said that with increased food costs, "we are seeing changing attitudes about our food system."
"People are becoming more engaged," 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 group's 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 in the towns of Sun City and Surprise. The fruit reaches thousands of people, including those at domestic violence shelters in Tempe and 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," 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."
Boissier, who grew up on Park Avenue in Manhattan, drives through the Berkeley hills in a Toyota hybrid loaded with apples and ladders, helping homeowners unable to keep up the pie-baking pace and relieving them of the guilt of waste.
In the bustling kitchen of the Bay Area Rescue Mission in nearby Richmond, California, a shelter serving more than 800 people a day, the apples are 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," Hunderson said. "If I had a backyard with fruit going, I'd bring it here, too."
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/14/america/fruit.php






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French market pictures

Many of the bloggers on Farm Blogs From Around the World sell their produce at weekly markets.

I go to our weekly local market every Thursday, sometimes helping out my cheese making friends and neighbours, or selling my books in July and August, and as a customer virtually every week.

In fact, as a family of five, we do nearly all our food shopping at the market, save staples like rice and pasta, and some other meat which we get on barter or buy from a friend who produces organic beef or from our local butcher.

We also do other barter (e.g. hay for potatoes), have our own garden, orchard and chickens, and best of all, there is our very generous 86 year old neighbour Jean-Baptiste who has to be the best vegetable gardener I have ever met, and who gives us lots of produce and advice.

If you'd like to look at photos of our local French market here in the Auvergne, you can visit my blog A Place in the Auvergne and click onto the label 'Marche' or look for any posting titled a Thursday.

I started this blog at the beginning of the year (but the labels only later in the year, so again, look for postings from any week entitled Thursday) so you can see the produce, colours and crowds of the market right through an entire year.

For my follower The Dairy Princess in particular, here are some photos of the goats cheeses made by another of my local friends, photos you can also find at A Place in the Auvergne, Thursday, 11th September, 2008.

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Farm Market in western New York (7th September, 2008)

Thanks to The Skoog Farm Journal for these pictures of the local produce available at their local Farm Market in the in the village of Brockport, western New York (photos taken 7th September, 2008).

The market takes places every Sunday from 8-2, and was the idea of Carrie Maziarz, a young woman on the Village Board, about 4 years ago.

One of the streets is closed off and a dozen vendors/farmers bring in their goods.

"It starts in June", writes Lori, "and runs through the end of October, with this being the time when the variety is the greatest. The produce is less expensive than that found in the local super markets, and rain or shine, has a great following."

"We also have a bakery, a sausage maker, and a florist represented."

"One of the side benefits, is the socialization that is taking place. There are now umbrella tables set up for people to sit at and chat with their friends... it turns into real community experience and we love it."

"Here in western New York we have an amazing number of orchards and farms that grow a great variety of vegetables. The sun and rain may not have been good for making hay, but it sure was perfect for making gardens grow. The basket of veggies is from our own garden."

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Farm Market in Brockport, New York

Thanks to Lori at The Skoog Farm Journal http://skoogfarm.blogspot.com for sending me these photos of a farm market in the U.S.A. this last weekend.

She writes:
"More and more vendors are appearing now that the fruit and vegetables are ready to eat. We live in and area that is full of orchards as well as big farms that grow veggies. Thanks to the horses, our dirt is very rich and our gardens do very well."

I just posted pictures of a French market from last Saturday, and it's interesting to compare the difference in prices, especially given how low the dollar (or 'peso' as some less charitable people in Europe call it now) is against the euro.

Please do send me pictures of your local farm market. I am particularly interested in also hearing about the clientele and their demographic.

Of course here in France, the notion of a 'farm market' is not one that really exists. There are simply markets that have been in existence for centuries and which continue to flourish, at least as far as food is concerned.

For other products, such as clothes, with so many cheap imports from China available to all wholesalers and retailers, many market stall holders are struggling to compete against regular shops. Their price advantage has evaporated and the timing of the markets (during the week and working hours mostly, except in the larger towns) doesn't suit a more office/factory workforce when the markets had traditionally served more flexible agricultural communities and ones with more non-working women.

What has changed though, certainly, is a dramatic increase in a new generation of well-educated, lifestyle driven and especially organic 'petits producters' (small producers). They are breathing new life into markets that during the 80s and 90s were struggling to differentiate the quality of the food available with that of the supermarkets.

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