This expression came to mind when I read about the fruit-foraging movement in this morning’s New York Times. It began in the SF Bay Area (of course); a bartender at Chez Panisse started a neighborhood exchange in which people could pick each other’s lemons, peaches and, of course, loquats. Got too many persimmons? Talk to the guy over the fence with an embarrassment of apples. 

Now the movement has gone national: web sites like neighborhoodfruit.com connect produce lovers from Oregon to Brooklyn. Just reading about the movement reminded me of moving to Auburn as a kid, and stopping beside Highway 49 on the way to school, with my younger brother and sister, to shovel grapes into our open mouths. This was the Valley they were talking about: free fruit, baby!

It also made me wonder about the expression “low hanging fruit,” and how that came to be a business euphemism for easy pickings, and if that was necessarily a good thing. The first time I heard the term in that context was about ten years ago. I was working for a little web company that had just been bought by AOL (which bought everything then). Our strange and creative little sites were being shuttered by the folks in Virginia but we would be retained to help them find the “low hanging fruit” of the business at the time.

“Isn’t that the rotten stuff that the smart animals won’t eat?” one of my colleagues asked. She was soon let go.

One of the chefs quoted in the Times made a walnut liqueur from walnuts she found on the ground. “It’s cooking from nothing,” she said, which is appropriate to these times. I heard from not one but two ex-students in the last few hours who are desperate for a job, any job. Right about now they might be hitting the walnut liqueur.

Remember, kids: It’s a shell game.