Urban Foragers Are Mapping Edible Plants Around the World

Ethan Welty and Caleb Phillips originally started Falling Fruit so they could keep track of edible plants in their city. The two are avid foragers, often sourcing their fruits and vegetables for free from city streets and public spaces.

Foraging can help people save money and prevent food waste. And for Welty, one of the biggest benefits of Falling Fruit is that it can help people learn about the “different plants that have some sort of edible use” in their city. For instance, it’s a useful tool in community education programs, like urban foraging trips, as well as in classes that teach people how to prepare the foraged fruits and vegetables they brought home, says Garrett Broad, associate professor in communications at Rowan University.

Since launching in 2013, Falling Fruit has mapped over 4,000 different species of edible mushrooms and plants — including fruit trees, berries and herbs — across almost 2 million publicly accessible foraging spots in cities around the world. “To some extent,” Welty tells Sentient, it turns the city into an arboretum.”

Cities Get Involved

Zooming in on Billings, Montana, the Falling Fruit map reveals edible plants clustered within the city’s parks. These plants are part of the city’s Parkland Gleaning Project to give excess harvest to neighbors facing hunger.

Starting in 2018, the city’s Parks and Recreation Department added dozens of fruiting plants — including chokeberries, cherry bushes, and also pear and apple trees —  to nine of their public parks and used Falling Fruit to map them.

“The purpose of the project is making sure that you can go out during these times and glean and have access to these apples, plums, these little berries,” Nick Miller, the city’s Forestry and Natural Resources supervisor, tells Sentient. “It’s a nice service that we offer the public, and it’s important for people to take advantage of it.”

When the program was first launched, it made a splash on the local food scene. “For a while you could head out into Billings and get yourself a chokeberry latte,” he says. Others would turn the berries into flour and make “this really neat purple and white sourdough loaf that was kind of tart, but then with the right jam on it, it was amazing.”

Today, Miller says there’s less awareness surrounding the city’s gleaning program, but that’s something he wants to see change. His goal is to add more plants while increasing outreach, including sourcing and sharing recipes from residents to help make preparing the different fruits more accessible.

The interactive map offers details for foraging, but more than that, people can use it to learn more about their neighborhoods, Broad says. The community programs that Miller envisions can have a bigger impact when paired with the Falling Fruit map. “The website itself focuses a lot on just kind of putting the information out there,” says Broad, “but when you get a community together, they can use it as a way to learn more about their local community, learn about agricultural history, learn about ways to use a particular crop and prepare that crop.”

Creating and Maintaining the Map

The map of almost 2 million locations was a group effort, with input from volunteers, community groups and individuals.

While the platform was started and inspired by his experience as a forager, Welty has learned a lot over the decade that it’s been live. With an annual user base of around 300 thousand, Welty has found that the map’s users have a range of needs.

“We’ve learned that we can’t really anticipate what people want to find,” Welty says, so they have to stay flexible. “You know, we set a pretty broad definition of what is edible, but everyone’s definition is different, and some people’s definition is very broad,” he adds. Some want mushrooms, fruits and vegetables they can find in the grocery store, whereas others may be more interested in medicinal plants. Now, all new locations imported to the map are kept regardless of how niche, and there is an option to enable a filter for more commonly consumed plants.

Welty has been working on Falling Fruit for more than a decade, and over the years, his ability to commit significant chunks of time to the project has waxed and waned. Now, as a full-time father with a full-time job, he can only spend a few hours a week working on it. It’s why he’s been building a dedicated group of core volunteers to support the growing project.

Falling Fruit is completely sustained by app sales, with annual expenses sitting at about $2,000. The app costs $1 to download and rakes in roughly $6,000 per year, allowing the nonprofit to pay its operating costs and build up savings.

Welty and the other volunteers are preparing for the next phase of Falling Fruit, including the launch of a new website with additional features such as more details on seasonality. Ultimately, Welty hopes that these updates to Falling Fruit can “grow the demand so that we can start to affect change and design our cities differently in the future,” he says. “Most of the vegetation in the city is actually planted, and so that’s an opportunity” for a more edible landscape.