S2E3: If You Were A Fruit...

Welcome to Season 2: Episode 3, If you were a fruit…you’d be a fineapple. Season 2 is all about our food system, food access and food justice. In this episode we are joined by Tiare Gill and Jordyn Egbert from City Fruit in Seattle to talk about gleaning, Seattle’s historic fruit trees and orchards, and what trees drink.

To quickly define gleaning, it is the act of harvesting excess produce that would otherwise go to waste and redistributing it throughout the community. If our local food is wasted, this has a lot of environmental impacts! Gleaning is a very important piece of the food sovereignty puzzle, and we discuss these topics and more in our interview.

As with the previous episode, we recorded the interview in May of 2021, so a few of the items are a tiny bit out of date. Again, any references made to ‘last year’ mean 2020, while ‘next year’ indicates 2022. A couple of updates are in the notes below.

Interviewees

Tiare Gill is from Oahu, but has spent time in Washington over the past 6 years. She graduated from the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA with a bachelor's degree in Biology and Environmental Policy and Decision Making. Post graduation, she was an educator and volunteer mentor at the Slater Museum of Natural History. She currently works for City Fruit as the Community Growth and Impact Manager. In addition, she is currently enrolled as a Master's student in Urban Environmental Education at Antioch University in Seattle. She believes that food is not only a vital component of individual identity, but also community identity and hopes to be able to contribute to food sovereignty efforts in the community.

Jordyn Egbert is from both Leavenworth and Seattle, WA.  She received a Bachelors of Arts in Environmental Studies from Western Washington University and is pursuing a certificate in Fundraising Management from the University of Washington.  She became interested in working with organizations dedicated to addressing food insecurity and reducing food waste while working for the gleaning program at Upper Valley MEND in Leavenworth, and is currently working with City Fruit as the Development and Fundraising Specialist. Jordyn believes access to healthy food is a human right and should be available to every member of our community.

PS - you can see actual pictures of Tiare and Jordyn on City Fruit’s about us page.

City Fruit

City Fruit is a gleaning organization in Seattle, WA. They do a lot of work to maintain Seattle’s public orchards as well as harvest 45-50 thousand pounds of fruit each year from the public orchards as well as private fruit trees (although they harvested closer to 37 thousand pounds in 2021). They distribute the harvest within the community to both food banks as well as their Fruit-for-All, free fruit pop-up stands. Due to increased demand they went from 16 free fruit pop-up stands in 2020 to 19 in 2021. They also try to distribute fruit within 5 miles of where it was harvested, keeping it hyper local. The free fruit stands are placed in areas that are federally designated food deserts. They also offer education on food systems and STEM. In addition to the free services they offer, private fruit-tree owners can hire City Fruit staff for mulching, pruning, and tree trimming services which helps them fulfill their mission to maintain the health of Seattle’s orchards.

Tiare and Jordyn define gle