Changing how we live and eat, one fig at a time

At 2 o'clock in the morning, most people in this college town are holed up studying, headed home from a bar or curled up in bed.

Asiya Wadud, however, is reaching for the weeping branches of a tree on the south side of the UC Berkeley campus, picking olives. A handful of her friends are helping. There is a little beer, a little wine; it's part merrymaking, part urban harvest.

"Don't worry about sorting them," she says, dropping a handful into a paper bag. An alarming fraction of the fruits are mottled and a little wormy-looking. "We'll do that tomorrow."

Wadud, a bartender at Alice Waters' Chez Panisse, has become obsessed with saving city-grown fruit from being wasted, which is why she heads out in the darkness, stripping smallish green orbs from the branches of this unassuming tree rooted in a patch of grass between the street and a concrete wall.

She's also part of a growing movement of super-local eaters and activists interested in food not from the nearest farm, but from down the block. When she moved to south Berkeley four years ago from Ohio, she was struck by California's ubiquitous fruit and by the way people let it rot, as if backyard apples and figs were something unremarkable.

She gathered the courage to knock on strangers' doors and ask whether she might try one of their ripe plums, or sample a pear. No one refused; in fact, she says, people seemed relieved to share, as if the prospect of wasted food were a constant weight she was helping to lift.

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