is apple picking! Or at least that’s what I think. On Sunday, I went apple picking at Triple B Farms in Monongahela, Pa. which is about 45 minutes from Pittsburgh on winding roads that caution you: “Winding Road Next 1 3/4 miles”.
I appreciated the heads up, as I was driving the tiny but formidable Reva Gorelick, co-founder and president of Plant to Plate, a student organization at the University of Pittsburgh. Plant to Plate is an urban farm, situated in the heart of Pitt’s campus (in a neighborhood called Oakland, no relation to the California city). Despite my Carnegie-Mellon-ness (“plaid to the bone,” we like to say), I am the Community Outreach Chair for Plant to Plate (and happy to do it!). We are an umbrella group of the Hillel-Jewish University Center, but many of our members and some of our board is not Jewish. Read more…
Plant to Plate was started (along with Marc Schutzbank) after Reva took a trip to Oz Farm in California, in conjunction with the Jewish Farm School. The goal of the organization is not just to grow food in an urban area, but to teach students how to cook with local, seasonal, and organic ingredients, and to take these efforts into the larger Pittsburgh community. As Jewish law dictates, we are giving away a portion of our yield to the Squirrel Hill Food Pantry.
We also venture outside Steel City to do things that get us closer to our food–and this is where the apple picking comes in. Eleven of us barreled outside the city limits to pick Golden Delicious apples (and one other variety: Moosa? Moussaka? Mitsubishi?). After some great instruction on how to pick an apple (take hand, place on apple, turn gently, pull hand away holding apple), we set about picking. The plastic bags we were given looked tiny but they held more than you might think.
As we were leaving, who do we bump into, 25-plus miles from home, but Rabbi Cohen of Aish Pittsburgh and his beautiful family. The world is so tiny!
I like to tie things back to community (this should be obvious by now)–and so here it goes: food brings people together. Picking your own food brings people together. So does preparing it (we didn’t get that far). While most people came in pairs, we left at the end with full stomachs, apple skin in our teeth, and a sense that we did something really neat together to commemorate the start of fall, the harvest, and Sukkot.
