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Vice Blog

LOS ANGELES - O FREE BOUNTY, WHERE DO YOU LIVE?

Today's featured story

is all about how you can molest the genetic code of Earth's innocent bounty in attempts to make it "better" (you can't). Special things happen when you just let the planet work like it made itself to: fruit falls from the skies, right into your hands, and for free. No, seriously, it does. Like Hollywood's maps to the stars' homes but actually useful,

Fallen Fruit

's guides show all the important boulevards branching off onto smaller streets that're dotted with stars, marking not rotting bags of Scientologist flesh but where to find nature's dessert, fresh and free off its source. Call this the endeavor of art-hippies if you must, but shit, free non-rat-bitten/non-moldy food is never a bad concept. We talked to Fallen Fruit co-founder Matias Viegener to find out where this idea came from.

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Vice: How did this fruit party get started?

Matias Viegener:

We looked around Silver Lake and saw all these fruit trees that went unharvested. We thought about ways to not only talk about these trees, but to use them to get people to think about they city and how we live in it.

Was it hard finding enough fruit to make it fruitful?

No, that's just one of the things that characterizes the climate of Los Angeles, where there is fruit year-round. Apples, avocados, peaches, plums, oranges, loquats, kumquats, etc. But we've learned every city has some fruit that grows really well, such as the apricot in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For about two weeks, there are apricots everywhere, falling to the ground and going unused. And the amazing part is that most people in the neighborhood still drive to a market to buy fruit.

I imagine a lot of crust punks use your maps. Anyone else?

Most are mid-20's through mid-40's but we also meet people from all ages, parents with kids and seniors too. We tend to get a lot of urban activists, handcrafters, bicyclers, and the eco-minded. One of our main goals is to get people who would never meet, much less talk, to engage in collaborative projects such as jam making together. The Public Fruit Jam is an event we hold two or three times a year, in which all the citizens are invited to meet at an art gallery or museum and make jam together.

So is your project one of those "symbols of hope?"

We hope that Fallen Fruit is a lot of things. We are totally into freegan values, but we also believe the idea of scavenging could be viewed as sharing. 20th century culture is so much about waste and excess, but perhaps in the future it could be about resources.

Why fruit and not vegetables?

Historically, fruit is a symbol of goodness. It is something that we have in common all around the world, in all cultures, and for all social classes and age groups. Fruit trees don't ask for anything back, they just give and want to picked. We like fruit because it's ordinary, but also very special. You might think of it as a natural object, but all fruit is a hybrid of nature and human intervention. In that way it's collaborative, and just as much a form of culture as of nature. The preparation and sharing of food were our first forms of culture, one of the first ways we learned to cooperate and exchange rather than compete. Fruit is also the food that appears most often in art. Partly this is because of its symbolic power, a symbol of goodness, bounty, and hospitality. But also because of its formal qualities of color, texture and shape. Fruit is beautiful.

CHRIS HATHERILL