Mapping the Locavore's Food Supply

FiveThirtyEight and ESPN recently produced a short documentary about the creators of Falling Fruit—a website that maps food sources in cities around the world.

1 minute read

December 17, 2014, 7:00 AM PST

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


In the first installment of a series of short documentaries, FiveThirtyEight and ESPN Films introduce Evan Welty and Caleb Phillips, creators of the Falling Fruit website—"an open-source, user-generated website that catalogs the location of edible plants all over the world."

As Anna Maria Barry-Jester explains in the FiveThirtyEight post, Falling Fruit "has more than 786,000 data points, each of which represents a location containing one or more plants."

"What’s remarkable about the site," adds Barry Jester, "is that 98 percent of the data points currently come from municipal tree inventories."

The article goes on to address the question asked by the headline: "How many people can the plans in one city feed?" although the answer is not totally clear.

When Planetizen first caught wind of Falling FruitHenry Grabar wrote about the potential of the site to help planners design more edible cities.  

Tuesday, December 16, 2014 in FiveThirtyEight

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