Thwump.
Thwump thwump thwump.
Splat.
What's that? Why, it's the sound of fruit falling in neighborhoods all over California, where trees dripping with plums, pears, lemons, and figs (among other bulbous delights) give up their harvest willingly every year. And, until recently, where most of that juicy bounty was going to waste.
Enter volunteer harvesting, a new movement in neighborhood do-gooding and a potent, very sensible weapon in the battle against hunger. It works like this: Homeowners in possession of fruit-bearing trees agree to surrender their extra harvest. Local folks arrive to pick the ripe stuff, promptly swinging it by shelters and hunger-relief organizations for immediate distribution. Presto! Everybody wins.
In some cases, as with Natasha Boissier's North Berkeley Harvest, the organization can be relatively mellow (and even impromptu). In others, as with Silicon Valley's Village Harvest, we see impressive logistics. For example: Village Harvest has a database of 1000+ fruity homeowners, an equally robust roster of volunteers, and a fat list of community drop-off locations throughout the Bay Area.
Happy statistic: In 2007, Village Harvest picked almost 125,000 lbs. of fruit from local backyards and small orchards.
It's not just California, either: At the United Food Bank in Mesa, Arizona, you can volunteer your trees, and "citrus volunteers" will arrive at your home to do the picking.
There's another term for the regular folk who harvest fruit from their neighborhood trees: urban gleaners. You can read more about them in this nifty New York Times article, or check out one of our favorite documentaries: The Gleaners and I, directed by French national treasure Agnès Varda.