Resilient Ideas: Making Fruit Public

Photo by Alexandra Crosby

“Fresh fruit is a human right!” proclaims a sign. The scene is Los Angeles City Hall, and the protesters in homemade spacesuits are members of Fallen Fruit, a collective that uses art and activism to promote the use of city land as gardens to feed city residents.

Fallen Fruit began by illustrating land-use issues with artistic, useable maps for gleaning public fruit growing on or over public spaces. They also organize events, like twilight fruit forages and their annual “fruit jams,” where neighbors pool fruit resources to invent new jam recipes. The gatherings mix fun and community-building in equal measure.

Video: Fallen Fruit provides maps for locals to make use of public fruit trees.

 This year, Fallen Fruit’s star project is curating EATLACMA, an exhibit on food, art, culture, and politics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It features intriguing use of the permanent collection and 50 artists’ gardens on the museum grounds that will, of course, be harvested this autumn.

 

 

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Susan DeFreitas wrote this article for A Resilient Community, the Fall 2010 issue of YES! Magazine.

More Resilient Ideas

A Hand-Built Home		Low-Impact Urban Living		Bike As You Are		Return of the Mercantile		Processing Food Where the Food Is
Beekeeping on City Rooftops		Reclaim, Repair, Rebuild		Making Fruit Public		Get Off the Grid		Sunshine on the Menu

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10 Resilient Ideas are part of A Resilient Community, the Fall 2010 issue of YES! Magazine.