Two Serves of Fruit a Day Free Challenge

 About this time last year as I surveyed the bags of free loquats hanging over fences around Bega I thought to myself, I wonder if I could go a whole year only eating foraged and gifted fruit and still have the recommended two serves of fruit a day?

And so the Two Serves of Fruit a Day Free Challenge began. As regular readers know I like personal challenges and I like foraging. I like challenges because it is very easy to get stuck in familiar habits so personal challenges shake the habits and assumptions that go with them a little bit. Our large brains also like the intellectual stimulation of challenges. So when I started the challenge it was with the expectation that I wouldn't manage it perfectly but I would learn a lot in the process. 

So how did I go?

Well as expected I did buy some fruit: some rhubarb, persimmons and kiwi fruit at the Farmers Markets; some apricots at a roadside stall; and some beautiful plump quinces from the Bulk Food Store, in total $108, for the entire year. For comparison the fresh fruit bill for the previous 12 months was $772. Some months into the challenge when I was drying bucketfulls of foraged plums I decided to try not to buy dried fruit either. My total dried fruit bill for the year ended up being $184 compared to the previous year of $617. I have done a Food Audit every few months for the last three years as a way of tracking my progress in living my values so it is easy to find how much I have spent on fruit. 

So what did I learn during the year:

1. The best way for me to get two servings of fruit a day is to eat it at breakfast on top of my muesli or pancakes

2. You don't actually need to have a fruit bowl with apples and bananas in it. Don't laugh, this was actually hard. I had an internal assumption that to be a healthy person/good mother/grandmother I needed to have a fruit bowl filled with apples and bananas on the table at all times. To sometimes not have a fruit bowl out at all because the fruit was in the fridge or the cool cupboard required a readjustment of my thinking. 

3. There are two fruit droughts in the year when it is difficult to get fresh fruit. The period between end of citrus and beginning of the stone fruits Sept-Nov and the period between the end of the stonefruits/apples and beginning of the citrus April-June. The fruit saviours of these times are loquats, fejoias and lilly pillies. It seemed like I ate nothing else except these for months. 

4. There are two fruit gluts a year, the summer fruit glut and the winter fruit glut. This is the time when you need to learn to preserve fruit either by jamming, stewing, drying, or making fruit leather from it. 

5. There is plenty of fruit in Bega and so many trees with it dropping uneaten to the ground. There are also people going hungry so the difficulty is how to connect the two. I don't know the answer to this. 

6. Some fruit has a very short season so you have to enjoy it when it occurs for example mulberries. 

7. Eating apples and bananas is very boring compared to eating : loquats, mulberries, nashi pears, plums, strawberries, gooseberries, apples, apricots, lemons, fejioas, lilly pillies, raisin tree fruit, avocados, lemonades, mandarins, oranges, grapefruit, limes, rhubarb, quinces, pears, cumquats, peaches, nectarines, blackberries, figs, flax lily berries, blackberry nightshade berries, Irish Strawberry tree fruit, pigface fruit, passionfruit, pomegranates, hawthorn jelly and crabapple jelly. 

8. You can dry fruit on the dashboard of your car .

9. Some very generous people in Bega put fruit boxes on their front fence. Thank you. 

10. Eating seasonally makes you feel connected to the local area and the seasons.

11. That you have to share with the wild birds and the fruit bats. A tree might have loads of fruit but then the fruit bats find it.

12. Some years have bumper crops followed by years with barely anything. The loquats this year are very thin on the ground and I wouldn't have started this challenge had it been this year because the abundance I saw last year has gone. 

13. You don't have to have the same food available all year. I know this seems like another obvious one but it was hard to get used to. I don't need to preserve enough apple for the entire year because when it runs out it will be fejoia season and I can dry fejoias to eat for the next few months, then when they run out I can eat dried raisin tree fruit. 

14. You can substitute fruit in recipes. I know this also seems obvious but if the recipe calls for blueberries or any berry you can substitute mulberries, blackberries, lilly pillies (whatever is in season). Recipes like yum yum balls which require dates can have fejoias or lilly pillies instead. If the muffins are sultana muffins swap the sultanas for raisin tree fruit. The main thing is to be flexible. My homemade muesli now reflects the seasons. The dried fruit are whatever two dried fruits I have in the cupboard and the some in-season seeds/nuts. Having said that I am looking forward to dock and plantain seeds being back in season. 

15. Climate change is moving the dates that food is available. The blackberry season moved a month forward from the previous two years this year. 

It has been a very enjoyable experience and I don't intend to restart buying fruit. I am looking forward to the fruit trees I have planted getting bigger and producing as well.

This year I have decided to see if I can live off the greens in my garden and the edible greens I forage as still get a daily serving of green leafy vegetables.