Fallen Fruit

May 7, 2005

Red apples on the left, yellow apples on the right. All of the apples were going to waste.

As a fan of food foraging and fruit stealing, and as a woman who had never bought fruit except for bananas, mangos and the occasional avocado until she moved up North to the Polar Circle, I applaud the Fallen Fruit Collective for cultivating the culture of gleaning. Dave Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young started out by mapping the ripening fruit in their own Silverlake California neighbourhood (in LA). Think globally, act neighbourly.

For those of us not fully familiar with Leviticus chapter 19 verses 9-10, it calls upon us farmer-gardener types not to pick our fields clean, but to be a tiny bit sloppy and leave some food at the edges for the poor and the strangers. If you’ve ever taken a walk in a California suburb, you will be amazed at the sheer volume of fresh fruit growing at those edges and dripping down into the street. Fruit trees burgeoning with apples, figs, apricots, peaches, bananas, oranges, lemons, limes, loquats, cumquats, plus raspberry, ollalaberry and blackberry bushes are ubiquitous and seem never to get harvested, as if everyone was trying to get off easy on all that sinning by leaving the edges of their yards to the poor and the strange.

For those of us not fully familiar with the laws of the City of Los Angeles, one of them dictates that the fruit of trees leaning over public property is free for anyone to pick.

Aware that an abundant crop of delicious fresh fruit goes unharvested every year, artist collective Fallen Fruit distributed maps of areas of Los Angeles with the locations of the fruit trees ripe for picking. Imagine that the city is a huge supermarket, and the streets are the isles. There are avocados on Tularosa Dr. and there’s a ‘HUGE FIG TREE’ on Larissa near Sunset Blvd. Peaches and loquats are on Marcia Dr. and if you ring the doorbell, the peach lady on the corner will invite you into her back yard to take as many zucchini as you like.

Under the cover of darkness, the Fallen Fruit collective on a gleaning foray

Fallen Fruit set about mapping all the free fruit it could find and encouraged others to do the same. On their website are a number of maps that tell you where there’s free fruit for the taking. In addition they call upon everyone to petition their city councils to exclusively plant fruit trees, to create an abundant supply of free fruit in the city. Private homeowners are asked to grown fruit and vegetables at the perimeter of their property, that everyone can experience the unbeatable taste of freshly picked – and almost stolen – what seems like forbidden fruit.

• the Fallen Fruit Manifesto
• Another sort of Fallen Fruit, this time it’s ‘fallen by the wayside’
• Stolen fruit should be on some sort of list, it’s so good…

debra at 1:58 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us

Scared of a little granola perfume

May 6, 2005

In Dutch we have a term, ‘doorheenbijten’ that means literally ‘to bite through something’. We use this term to describe the painful process of exploring unchartered territory. Think for just a moment about what could have motivated someone to invent such an idiom. Now, think about the circumstances that would have caused an entire culture to embrace this idiom enough to use it regularly!

The images above show the author about to take her first bite of paan without any idea what paan could possibly smell, taste or feel like. It is quite strange to try something with very little previous reference, and having never tried chewing tobacco, paan was unchartered territory for me.

In a neat little kiosk by the side of the road the paan wallah prepared the leaf for me with all manner of goos, crystals, flakes, shavings and sprinkles - none of which seemed familiar. Although I would like to say that I bravely put the roll into my mouth and enthusiastically started chomping away, the photograph above reveals the utter lack of trust and relax I had in approaching this new foodstuff. You can also see how such an utter lack of trust and relax results in a particularly unaesthetic portrait. That fact alone should be motivation enough to drop some food taboos.

Good news is that as I reported earlier, paan is delicious, something like eating granola perfume. And like the photograph that I keep of myself in the freezer to remind me of what I looked like in a bikini in 1998 (to avoid an over-consumption of ice-cream), I have decided to keep this picture at hand to remind myself to be more trusting of new foods.
(Please read more… )

debra at 12:36 | Comments (1) | post to del.icio.us

Restaurant for anorexics

May 5, 2005

Sehnsucht, (means longing in German) is the name of a Berlin restaurant for anorexics. Owner Katja Eichbaum, formely anorexic, started this project with private funding (only her father would lend her money) as a therapy for her own condition. The chef is anorexic as are several members of staff. Sehnsucht’s menu items have names that don’t include words for food to avoid confronting anorexics with the fact that they are about to eat. ‘Hallo’ (lobster bisque), ‘Pirate’s Eye’ (2 fishfingers and a fried egg), and ‘Heissehunger’ (ravenous hunger = rack of lamb) are all dishes that non-anorexics might order in ‘normal’ restaurants. But one item on the menu consists simply of a fork, knife, and an empty plate. It is titled ‘Thieves Platter’ and facilitates the anorexic diner to steal (or share) from those dining with her.

As expected the restaurant has received a huge amount of international publicity. And although I have not yet eaten at there, relying solely on restaurant reviews to inform myself, if Sehnsucht is an attempt to create a location for anorexia patients in the guise of a regular restaurant for the people that love them, it is also a wasted opportunity.

Why not revel in anorexia? Why not serve food items so refined and ’stretched’ like anorexics themselves create on the spot each night at the family dinner table? Anorexics are master chefs and food stylists when placed in the harsh context of the family; hardboiled eggs with the yolks surgically removed, crackers deconstructed so that their total surface area has been increased twenty-fold, slices of bread with each visible grain extracted and displayed on the edge of the plate, utterly dissected broccoli. I say this without having seen Sehnsucht’s menu but hope sincerely that it is not just another do-gooder resto in which the real food on the menu functions only to lure the paying and eating guests.
(Please read more… )

debra at 8:38 | Comments (12) | post to del.icio.us