Have you ever stopped to think if there was a website that helped people know where they can forage for food worldwide? This is precisely what the website Falling Fruit is about!
While many websites circulate random concepts or are generic, Falling Fruit is a site that aims to show people worldwide the best places to forage for food.
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If you want to learn more about how the website came to life or its success, this article will dive deep into its success, why it was made, and its impact on society.
The idea behind Falling Fruit
Falling Fruit was the result of a simple answer to a simple question. Ethan Welty was a young graduate student who wanted to know the best place to find apples.
He enjoyed foraging, but as time passed, it became harder and harder to forage for food. This is what gave Ethan the idea to create Falling Fruit. It started with a question — What if there was a site that could help me find places to forage? And this is what Ethan decided to do.
He created Falling Fruit to make the best foraging sites worldwide accessible to anyone through the Internet.
How Falling Fruit was created
Ethan did not single-handedly create Falling Fruit. Instead, it was a product of collaboration between him and Caleb Phillips, a computer scientist and fellow forager. Both founded Fallingfruit.org in 2013, a site that provides an open-source map showing edible plants in cities worldwide.
The app was built to help promote foraging by making it more accessible to people who would otherwise not know where to look.
What the website offers
The website is a comprehensive tool for future and current foragers, providing the information needed to forage around a city. This includes recording future locations for other foragers or users to revisit and fruiting schedules.
It’s important to note that Phillips and Welty didn’t have to go to each location to start the app. Instead, they took tree and plant inventories from governments and universities. They also formatted the map as open source, which invites other people to contribute, helping others find the location of more foraging sites.
Is Falling Fruit successful?
Since its inception, Falling Fruit has already been featured in over 1.5 million locations worldwide. This includes places in Australia, South Africa, Poland, and Vietnam. So far, the site has gained over 2 million users ranging from amateur to professional foragers or people who want to learn about the excellent places they can forage from.
Although this might not seem a lot to some, it’s important to remember that this is a practical tool with practical use and doesn’t promote itself that much. Some people discovered the website alone or because others told them about it.
Falling Fruit is a fun way to get people into foraging by giving them a tool that can help them find their first few spots.
What the website hopes to accomplish
The website hopes to attract more people into foraging, which could, later on, inspire them to find and share their favorite spots. If the site can attract more people to the hobby, they might become future contributors and, in turn, help the site grow even further.
Falling Fruit is a perfect example of a website that started with a simple idea, but grew into a tool with over 2 million unique visitors. The site proves that foraging might seem like a niche hobby, but others love to practice it.
