Please Pick Project Founder Gives TED Talk on Edible Village Concept

Nyack resident Suzanne Barish recently delivered a TED Talk about Please Pick Project, an organization committed to giving all people free access to organic food by weaving it into suburban and urban landscapes.

Please Pick Project grew more than 2,000 lbs of food in Nyack, the original edible village, in 2015, and its participation is increasing drastically this year.

In the TED talk, Barish tells the story of the peach tree downtown whose fruit she watched fall and rot.

"Almost 200 people walk past the peach tree, a source of good healthy food growing in local soil, as they make their way down to the soup kitchen and I thought, there's something wrong," she said. "And I noticed, all these front yards are so empty."

It's economically and logistically difficult for many people to access healthy food, and it's difficult for most of us to know where our food comes from.

"I said let's create a food forest all around us," she said, "so anyone that needs good food can just pick it for free."

Nyack High School wrote a grant, the group gave out seedlings, Nyack Center made its backyard a community garden, and the idea grew.

Some of the areas of resistance were worries about vandalism, wild animals, and losing everything in a garden to other people. But the reality instead was a project that engaged the entire community.

The model has spread to South Orangetown, NY, Fair Lawn, NJ, and Hastings, NY this year; and it is being considered as a 2017 initiative in several towns around the country.

WATCH: Creating an Edible Town In New York. | Suzanne Barish | TEDxBergenCommunityCollege

From the YouTube TED Talk description:

Please Pick Project is a small example of how we can revolutionize our relationship with food and address many of the health and hunger problems that plague communities around the country and around the world. The initial purpose of this project was to create an edible town in Nyack, NY, thus connecting people to real food grown in real soil in the urban and suburban landscape, and to eliminate the many obstacles that we all face to accessing the healthy, organic food that we all need regularly. When good food is woven into the streetscapes of our urban and suburban communities and made available for picking, it adds healthy eating and an ac- knowledgment of the earth to a fast-paced culture that frequently veers away from nature for the sake of convenience.

Suzanne is the Director of Communications for Rockland Farm Alliance, a non-profit dedicated to preserving suburban farmland. She has a Master’s Degree in English Literature, and she worked as an English professor and writer for a decade until writing ultimately opened up the portal to a career in farming and agriculture. Suzanne has always stayed close enough to the natural world to keep a few layers of soil under her fingernails, but high school science classes thwarted her ambitions to seriously pursue agriculture or animal science as a living. Despite her preference for poetry anthologies over biology textbooks, she found herself moving cyclically right back toward the earth as she moved into her thirties. She created Please Pick Project in 2014 after walking past a peach tree with heavy fruit languishing, unpicked, within reach of hundreds of people who walk past on the sidewalk. With the help of some agricultural experts and a generous group of neighbors, Please Pick Project e

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more athttp://ted.com/tedx