Urban Scrumpers Are Picking the Forbidden Fruit

Children during an urban harvest in London this year. Photo by Karen Liebreich, Abundance London.

Growing army of guerrilla fruit pickers

By Sara Calian
Wall Street Journal
Oct. 29, 2010

Excerpt:

My friend Sarah Cruz called me at 9 a.m. on a recent Saturday and said, “We found a hidden orchard on an abandoned property, can you grab my apple-picking poles at my house in your car and I’ll meet you there on my bike at noon.” I put my 3-year-old and 5-year-old daughters in the car, called my husband and told him to collect my 7-year-old son after football practice and bike to the apple-picking spot in a leafy part of West London. It was impossible to see the hidden orchard from the road, so Karen Liebreich, Ms. Cruz’s picking partner, scrambled from the abandoned plot of bramble and rubble in her long, rubber boots to guide us to the five trees bursting with ripe Bramley eating and cooking apples.

For both the adults and the children it felt like a big clandestine adventure and all we were doing is picking apples about 10 minutes from our house. Or so it seemed. In actuality we were what the Brits call “scrumping,” or in other words, taking apples from trees we didn’t own—a fast-growing trend in urban London and throughout the U.K.

The trees and locations are spread among the pickers by word of mouth. Last spring, Ms. Cruz picked cherries in a local park. “People looked at me like I was stealing,” said Ms. Cruz, a coordinator for volunteer fruit gatherers. “But we are actually helping the council gather the fruit, which would just rot and go to waste.” The apple-picking area in question is under Hounslow Council, which issued a comment saying “We are more than happy for people to enjoy our trees and their fruit in London’s greenest borough.”

These women are part of a growing army of guerrilla fruit pickers, who climb fences and brave dangers ranging from broken wine bottles and stinging nettles to hostile dogs and turf-conscious rats to pick seasonal fruit in unorthodox places. Scrumping activists even have their own organization called Abundance, which is composed of volunteers throughout the U.K. who are dedicated to harvesting unpicked fruit. In London, Abundance has been set up as an association with charitable aims.

Read the complete article here.