Last month, SF Weekly reported on a little-known city program in which Department of Public Works employee Nancy Wong, in her spare time, is sent to people's homes to collect their lemons.
Wong has, in the past four years, picked about 4 tons of lemons. She delivers them to the San Francisco Food Bank where they are, for the most part, converted into many gallons of juice to nourish the city's less fortunate.
This bounteous harvest of lemons hails from only around 40 homes on Wong's route. There are, of course, plenty of other citrus trees just waiting to be harvested. In fact, there's even a registry.
Some 1,494 lemon trees are now registered on an interactive "Lemon Map" hosted by the JustOneTree.org, a nonprofit founded by ubiquitous urban forestry activist Isabel Wade. Yellow dots (naturally) mark each tree; individual addresses are no longer disclosed as, Wade says, registrants complained that invaders were showing up and helping themselves to fruit.
Fruit theft is not Wade's goal. But fruit redistribution is.
She estimates nobody in this city would need to buy a lemon grown outside San Francisco's borders if we were to establish an orchard of 12,000 trees. This, of course, would eventually necessitate some organized system of divvying up many tons of lemons.
Citywide lemon independence, then, would be quite a feat. First, we'd need to increase our lemon tree capacity severalfold, then we'd need to figure out a means of distributing a harvest that, as any owner of a lemon tree can tell you, never seems to cease.
Planting 12,000 lemon trees, Wade assures us, isn't just about the lemons. "It would be a demonstration that our city can be self-reliant in something," she says. "Once we do lemons, gosh, what else could we be self-sufficient in?"
Greens, perhaps? Maybe potatoes, "but I didn't think that was a sexy crop campaign."
Incidentally, the city's lemon program and the lemon registry are, oddly, not coordinated. A program in which workers are sent to collect lemons for distribution and a nonprofit aiming to grow more lemons for distribution are not growing together.
A vast influx of municipal lemons, finally, may force us to reconsider the role of the city's heartiest fruit. Making lemonade isn't exactly the thing to do in a municipality that very nearly passed a tax on sugary beverages. Wade suggests drinking hot lemon juice, unsweetened, with a slice of ginger in it, which will "truly improve your health."
Whether this will entice us to grow lemons across large swaths of the city remains to be seen. And, in any event, San Francisco remains ginger-dependent.
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