Learning to Pick Lemons

Earlier this month a TikTok video came across my Twitter feed, in which a young woman in California relates the story of how she came to learn that the lemon tree in her yard produced lemons she could in fact eat right off of the tree. This fact came as a huge shock to her- she had been under the impression that she had “to do something” to the lemons beforehand to make them edible, and that whatever that was had been done to store-bought produce making it safe or otherwise edible. The immediate reaction on Twitter was, as in this original posting screenshotted below, mostly negative (surprise!), making fun of the young woman and her confusion. However, as a number of folks I follow who retweeted the post pointed out, there’s really nothing very surprising at all about her confusion—instead, a sort of “food blindness” to the bounty that is often all around us is incredibly common in our world, and in fact afflicts pretty much all of us. Why does this inability to register and make use of the potential edible bounty that might literally be in our front yards exist? And why should this matter to us as we work to build and sustain community food forests here in Chattanooga and elsewhere in America?

There are any number of reasons people might not recognize food growing in their front yards, or—in the case of our work—in a public community food forest. Sometimes it is simply that they do not know that it is food: this is especially the case if the fruit or vegetable in question is not something usually sold in supermarkets or featuring in ordinary cuisine. In the case of community food forests this is as likely as not to be a common issue, since many of the things that grow best in such a setting are not immediately recognizable to most people, even most gardeners. This is part of the potential charm and benefit of a community food forest: a place for people to freely sample fruits, nuts, and vegetables that they’re unlikely to even see in other settings, much less feel like purchasing and trying at home. But it also means that education and identification have to be a crucial part of any food forest site, otherwise a lot of produce can go to waste, unrecognized and unconsumed (by humans anyway!).

But such inability to identify an edible fruit is not the root of the young woman above’s problem. Instead it is something that gets at the very nature of how we encounter and experience food in our world: we generally do not do so anywhere near the point of actual production, the field or orchard or plantation or feedlot where our food is actually grown or raised, nor do we see the complex processes and supply chains that deliver that food to us in packaged or carefully presented form, resulting in neat and homogeneous lemons, say, with a sticker and a bar code. The stages prior to the supermarket are mysterious, opaque, a matter for whoever is in charge of such things. Through a variety of processes, we are made to feel that we are unauthorized to harvest our own food, that we will either do it wrong or that we will miss some crucial step in the process. In academic-speak, we end up losing agency, the sense that we can in fact do things for ourselves without needing outside assistance or authorization. That feeling of not having agency is crucial, and perhaps the hardest barrier to overcome—if you feel you have agency, if you are authorized to, say, pick those lemons, you can overcome lack of knowledge (how do I know a lemon is ripe? is a question a motivated person can easily figure out via the internet—but you have to first feel that you can in fact pick those lemons).

There are other potential barriers as well. Many people are now well aware that our environments, particularly our urban ones, are awash with various chemical pollutants, that microplastics are pervasive, and that our soils are often contaminated with lead and who knows what else. It is possible that the young woman in the video thought that her soil was polluted—and odds are good that in fact it is, though that is, in this case, unlikely to be much if any problem in eating a lemon (greens and root vegetables are another matter). Such concerns are not irrational, and in some cases caution is very much in order—at the same time, a lot of urban and suburban free produce is literally out there for the picking without danger to the consumer, provided one knows where and where not to gather. There are also often concerns about damaging a fruit tree or a wild plant, a fear of having a negative impact—again, not irrational, but rather an opportunity for instruction and understanding.

Perhaps by this point you’re already thinking about ways a community food forest can help to address these problems—and there is a lot of potential, so I’ll limit myself to just a couple things. Key is education and interpretation, whether in the form of signage on a site, or in the form of classes, informal instruction, demonstrations, and so on, particularly for young people but really for everyone. Some of that entails teaching people what they can and cannot eat, how to know when something is ripe, whether a particular plant is edible—and whether they should be worried or not about the underlying soil or wider environment—and so on. But probably even more important is the role of the public food forest as a place in which people are made to feel that they can in fact pluck the lemon off the tree without being a farmer or an expert or a supermarket supply chain worker. We want people to feel a sense of agency in how they get and eat their food, in how they interact with the natural world in fact, not just as passive consumers or observers but as active participants, shapers and nurturers.

I know I’m outlining a pretty big task, and to be sure our little food forests are just one small part in the bigger equation—but I do think they can play a vital role in shifting how people look at food and at the natural world as a whole and our place in it, and how they look at themselves and their abilities and possibilities. This sort of transformation is itself part of an even bigger need, one that ties into any number of global issues and crises, all of which can quickly become overwhelming to think about. We here in Chattanooga—or wherever you happen to be while reading this—can’t directly solve those big things. But we can help one another grow some food and support one another in being participants in our food and our natural environments, changing our little corner of the world and ourselves in the process for the better.