Falling Fruit is not associated with Fallen Fruit. Fallen Fruit can be found at fallenfruit.org.
Donate We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and rely on donations to operate. If you are willing and able, please consider making a financial contribution. Donations within the United States are tax deductible.
Donate via Paypal Giving Fund
Write Falling Fruit is built by and for foragers – we want it to be the best tool available to the contemporary forager. Write us at [email protected], we would love to hear from you!
Translate Interested in volunteering as a translator? Email us and we'll invite you to join us on Phrase, where our translations are managed.
About the project
Falling Fruit is a celebration of the overlooked culinary bounty of our city streets. By quantifying this resource on an interactive map, we hope to facilitate intimate connections between people, food, and the natural organisms growing in our neighborhoods. Not just a free lunch! Foraging in the 21st century is an opportunity for urban exploration, to fight the scourge of stained sidewalks, and to reconnect with the botanical origins of food.
Our edible map is not the first of its kind, but it aspires to be the world's most comprehensive. While our users contribute locations of their own, we comb the internet for pre-existing knowledge, seeking to unite the efforts of foragers, foresters, and freegans everywhere. The imported datasets range from small neighborhood foraging maps to vast professionally-compiled tree inventories. This so far amounts to 3,641 different types of edibles (most, but not all, plant species) distributed over 1,667,093 locations. Beyond the cultivated and commonplace to the exotic flavors of foreign plants and long-forgotten native plants, foraging in your neighborhood is a journey through time and across cultures.
Join us in celebrating hyper-local food! The map is open for anyone to edit, the database can be downloaded with just one click, and the code is open-source. You are likewise encouraged to share the bounty with your fellow humans. Our sharing page lists hundreds of local organizations - planting public orchards and food forests, picking otherwise-wasted fruits and vegetables from city trees and farmers' fields, and sharing with neighbors and the needy.
Staff
Ethan Welty
[email protected]
Zürich, Switzerland
With technology and data, Ethan champions cities as sources of fresh and free food. He created Falling Fruit with Caleb Phillips in 2013 to promote urban foraging worldwide, and co-founded Community Fruit Rescue in 2014 to harvest and distribute surplus fruit growing around him in Boulder, Colorado. Beyond fruit, he juggles a photography career, research on glaciers, and an appetite for mountainous and riverine pursuits.
Board of directors
Jeff Wanner
[email protected]
Boulder, Colorado, USA
Since harvesting black and blueberries with his family as a child and, more recently, noticing the wealth of public fruit trees throughout Colorado, Jeff has developed a deep appreciation for the abundance of fruit growing in our cities. His first mission for Falling Fruit was to comb Boulder and Salt Lake City, paper maps in-hand, to record fruiting trees. When not working to improve building energy efficiency, he is usually helping out in the community or moving quickly over mountains by foot, ski, or bicycle.
Atlanta, Georgia, USA
Craig is the co-founder of Concrete Jungle, an organization in Atlanta, Georgia which grows food and picks fruit throughout the city for donation to local homeless shelters and food banks. As a Georgia Tech graduate, he's always looking for ways to combine fruit picking with new technologies, and will soon be deploying his fruit-tree spotting drone and tweeting fruit-ripeness sensor...
New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Emily is a diehard agroforestry evangelist, incorrigible forager, and proud mother to two cats, four quails, and the world's most magnificent canine. Her roots stretch deep into the Rocky Mountains, but these days her aboveground biomass is proud to call New Haven, Connecticut her home. She can often be found tending public food forests, reading enraptured in some cozy library corner, or waxing poetic about the magic of mycelium (and, supposedly, completing joint graduate degrees at the Yale School of Forestry and School of Global Affairs). Emily harbors a devastating addiction to travel, and could be just about anywhere right now.
Board of advisors
Southampton, United Kingdom
Alan has always enjoyed adventures and exploring. He began foraging as a way to introduce his young children to the outdoors lifestyle. He writes the Urbane Forager blog and published the Urbane Forager: Fruit and Nuts For Free book. He has legitimised foraging in public parks and established a community orchard in his home town, Southampton UK.
Silver City, New Mexico, USA
Ana is a postdoctoral researcher at the Federal University of Pará in Brazil. She is an anthropologist interested in understanding social and cultural diet habits. Ana worked mostly in the Brazilian Amazon. In Acre (western Amazon) she studied regional fruit consumption. Then, she worked in the Middle Solimões region, investigating diet change in remote communities. Between 2017 and 2018, Ana lived in small and medium towns of the Amazon Delta, looking at the effects of climate change on the food security of people living in informal settlements. She recently moved to southern New Mexico in the United States, where she works as a consultant.
Boulder, Colorado, USA
Caleb is a featherless bipedal humanoid passionate about food justice and finding creative ways to use technology to address social issues. When he's not biking around gawking at trees, he balances his efforts between his day job as a data scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado and as an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of Colorado. Besides all that work stuff, he likes to climb rocks, run trails, ride bikes, and generally be outdoors as much as possible. Caleb created Falling Fruit with Ethan Welty in 2013 and served on the Board of Directors for 6 years before taking a position on the Advisory Board.
San Francisco, California, USA
Cristina is an attorney with Shartsis Friese LLP in San Francisco, California, where she focuses on trademark prosecution and counseling. She is also a board member of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, which oversees public transportation, traffic and parking in San Francisco. In her spare time, Cristina sails the San Francisco Bay with the Bay Area Association of Disabled Sailors and competes in local and international regattas.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
David is a researcher in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also an avid forager and author of the book Urban Foraging: Finding and Eating Wild Plants in the City (free download).
United Kingdom
As a teenager, Tristram raised pigs on surplus food that he collected from his school kitchens, the local baker and village greengrocer. Noticing that a lot of this food was still suitable for human consumption led him to the realization that good, fresh food was being wasted on a colossal scale. Tristram has since worked tirelessly to bring this issue to the attention of the public, the media, and policy-makers. He founded the food waste campaign organization Feedback Global and wrote Waste: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal to demonstrate the extent of the problem on a global scale. In 2011, Tristram was awarded The Sophie Prize for his fight against food waste.
Translators
Amit Baum (עמית באום) – עִברִית
Ana Carolina de Lima – Português
Daniela Marini – Español
David Katzin – עִברִית
Ethan Welty – Français, Español
Heimen Stoffels – Nederlands
Jadalnia Warszawa – Polski
Karolina Hansen - Polski
Kira Dell – Português, Español
Laura Clabé – Français
Liana Welty – Español
Lola Ortiz – Español
Maria Noel Silvera – Español
Maria Rosa Puig – Español
Michela Pasquali – Italiano
Monica Breval Listán – Español
Mylène Jacquemart – Deutsch, Italiano
Parmenter Welty – Español
Raven Lyn – Português
Salomé Martin – Français
Sifis Diamantidis - Ελληνικά
Thomaz Brandão Teixeira – Português
Tim Conze – Svenska
Timna Raz – עִברִית
Tống Thái Vương - Tiếng Việt
Closing remarks
Falling Fruit is a 501(c)(3) (tax-exempt) public charity based in Boulder, Colorado. As a result, donations within the United States are tax deductible. You may review our letter of exemption from the IRS and verify our standing with IRS Publication 78 or the Colorado Secretary of State. Also available are our bylaws and board meeting minutes.
Falling Fruit
535 S 44th St, Boulder, CO 80305, USA
EIN: 46-5363428
Harvesting food in an urban setting comes with certain practical and moral considerations. For an introduction to the ethics of urban foraging, we recommend the following summary.
Information on Falling Fruit may be wrong or out of date. For example, many of the foraging maps migrated to Falling Fruit were hosted as public Google Maps on which markers were often moved accidentally, and municipal tree inventories are updated only (if ever) as trees are visited for maintenance. Be prepared to encounter inaccuracies in the field, and please edit the map as needed based on your discoveries. Ultimately, it is your responsibility to determine the identity, edibility, and location of a plant, and the responsibility of all to improve the quality of the map.