Welcome to Season 2: Episode 3, If you were a fruit…you’d be a fineapple. Season 2 is all about our food system, food access and food justice. In this episode we are joined by Tiare Gill and Jordyn Egbert from City Fruit in Seattle to talk about gleaning, Seattle’s historic fruit trees and orchards, and what trees drink.

To quickly define gleaning, it is the act of harvesting excess produce that would otherwise go to waste and redistributing it throughout the community. If our local food is wasted, this has a lot of environmental impacts! Gleaning is a very important piece of the food sovereignty puzzle, and we discuss these topics and more in our interview.

As with the previous episode, we recorded the interview in May of 2021, so a few of the items are a tiny bit out of date. Again, any references made to ‘last year’ mean 2020, while ‘next year’ indicates 2022. A couple of updates are in the notes below.

Interviewees

Tiare Gill is from Oahu, but has spent time in Washington over the past 6 years. She graduated from the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA with a bachelor's degree in Biology and Environmental Policy and Decision Making. Post graduation, she was an educator and volunteer mentor at the Slater Museum of Natural History. She currently works for City Fruit as the Community Growth and Impact Manager. In addition, she is currently enrolled as a Master's student in Urban Environmental Education at Antioch University in Seattle. She believes that food is not only a vital component of individual identity, but also community identity and hopes to be able to contribute to food sovereignty efforts in the community.

Jordyn Egbert is from both Leavenworth and Seattle, WA. She received a Bachelors of Arts in Environmental Studies from Western Washington University and is pursuing a certificate in Fundraising Management from the University of Washington. She became interested in working with organizations dedicated to addressing food insecurity and reducing food waste while working for the gleaning program at Upper Valley MEND in Leavenworth, and is currently working with City Fruit as the Development and Fundraising Specialist. Jordyn believes access to healthy food is a human right and should be available to every member of our community.

PS - you can see actual pictures of Tiare and Jordyn on City Fruit’s about us page.

City Fruit

City Fruit is a gleaning organization in Seattle, WA. They do a lot of work to maintain Seattle’s public orchards as well as harvest 45-50 thousand pounds of fruit each year from the public orchards as well as private fruit trees (although they harvested closer to 37 thousand pounds in 2021). They distribute the harvest within the community to both food banks as well as their Fruit-for-All, free fruit pop-up stands. Due to increased demand they went from 16 free fruit pop-up stands in 2020 to 19 in 2021. They also try to distribute fruit within 5 miles of where it was harvested, keeping it hyper local. The free fruit stands are placed in areas that are federally designated food deserts. They also offer education on food systems and STEM. In addition to the free services they offer, private fruit-tree owners can hire City Fruit staff for mulching, pruning, and tree trimming services which helps them fulfill their mission to maintain the health of Seattle’s orchards.

Tiare and Jordyn define gleaning and talk about why gleaning groups are so important. We discuss the environmental and social impacts of gleaning and how this practice fits in to our larger topic of food sovereignty. Jordyn mentions a 2016 study performed by Ample Harvest discussing just how much food from private gardens is wasted each year in the United States (11.5 BILLION pounds!!!), and how many millions of people that wasted food could feed each year if it were shared (28 million!!!). We’re just talking about garden produce here, which is a little mind blowing.

Tiare shares bit about the history of Seattle’s fruit trees and the stories are fascinating! Some people may not even be aware that Seattle has public orchards. Tiare recommends visiting Piper’s Orchard in Carkeek Park to see their wide variety of heirloom apples. The Poop Detective’s mind is also blown by the fact that an orchard isn’t always a large group of trees planted in rows. We also learn that Jen and Amy never argue… I mean discuss… :) Tiare talks about a mapping project the City of Seattle is working on tracking the location of fruit trees and the Magical Mapper maybe gets a little too excited about the human geography of it all.

City Fruit is a small nonprofit organization. Funding comes from their private tree care services, individual donations, and their membership program. City Fruit relies a lot on volunteers, so if you’d like to help out you can find more information or sign up here. There are not only options for harvesting, but for peer-to-peer fundraising, tabling at farmers markets and other events, and becoming community ambassadors. If you live inside Seattle city limits, you can register your tree with City Fruit which helps them track historic orchards and document the abundance Seattle’s fruit trees. If you’re interested, you can offer your fruit tree for gleaning. If your tree is registered it may or may not be harvested, based on staff resources as well as community demand for the type of fruit you have.

If you’re not in Seattle, there are gleaning groups all over. There’s even an interactive map to find a group near you! There’s also an app where you can share your excess bounty with local hunger relief organizations - it’s called Fresh Food Connect.

To wrap up and tie things back to our topic this season; in Seattle, this program alone saves about 45-50 thousand pounds of fruit from going to waste each year (closer to 37 thousand pounds in 2021); it is hyperlocal so uses fewer resources for packaging, transport, advertising, and other environmentally harmful aspects of the traditional commercial food system; fruit is typically distributed within 5 miles of where it was harvested, and is distributed in federally recognized food deserts; and food that would otherwise go to waste is now making it to people experiencing food insecurity.

By the way, you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out what trees drink!

Please join us on Tuesday, February 15 for episode 4 of this season. We’ll be talking to Holli Prohaska of the Urban Farm Collective in Portland, an organization that turns vacant city lots into urban farms where volunteers can barter their time for fresh garden produce.

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