Interesting article on the BBC …
Autumn is harvest time, of course, and both city and countryside are awash with an abundance of apples, pears and blackberries. This is a free and accessible source of fresh and scrumptious fruit, waiting to be picked. And surprisingly, much of it is left to ripen, wither, fall and rot, providing sustenance only for wasps and rats.
“People are wary of fruit that doesn’t come pre-packed from a supermarket,” says Daniele Rinaudo, coordinator for Sheffield Abundance, a group that collects unwanted fruit from the gardens and open spaces of the city and distributes it to worthy causes. “We are so far removed these days from the food we eat, we waste so much.”
The Abundance movement, which began in Sheffield in 2007 and is slowly spreading across the country, aims to change all that. Rinaudo says the South Sheffield group collects about 70% of its bounty from private gardens, and 30% from wild spaces and public land.
“Once you start looking upwards when you walk or cycle, rather than down at the pavement, you start seeing fruit trees everywhere,” she says. Many of them are in private gardens, but as Beviz adds, “someone will have an apple tree in their garden and still go to Tesco for apples”.
Abundance groups don’t steal fruit, they simply ask the people who own trees if they can pick it. As a local group becomes well known, tree owners will often come forward offering access to their unwanted apples or pears.
The results of these labours are distributed to children’s centres, homeless shelters and centres housing asylum seekers, among others. That’s positive in itself, but the educational aspect of the Abundance philosophy is important too.
“They are illustrating concepts like food miles, seasonality and rediscovering old varieties. They’re getting people away from the idea that blackberries have to come in little boxes, or that apples have to be this perfectly round red thing.”
But the final aim is to do away with city-wide groups altogether.
“Really we don’t want to be going to the other side of Sheffield to gather fruit,” says Rinaudo. “It would be great to get to the point where streets or neighbourhoods just see it as a natural thing to collect and distribute all this unwanted food themselves.”
“Our group just covers a small area of South Manchester,” she says. “We want to encourage other people in other parts of the city to set up their own groups.”
Abundance groups think theirs is an idea whose time has come. They say that in a time of recession and environmental concern, exploiting a local source of fresh food just seems sensible.
And of course, there doesn’t have to be any formal project in place at all. As a visitor to one Abundance message board writes: “There are a few people with fruit trees round here and when the fruit gets too much they leave it in front of the house with a little note saying ‘help yourself’.”
