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Tree-Planting Tour Stops Everywhere in Bay Area Except San Francisco

SF WEEKLY

In a city where lawmakers so joyously took the happy out of the Happy Meal, it's curious why San Francisco is now skipping out on an opportunity to teach kids that apples are tasty, too.

This week, the award-winning Fruit Tree Tour is descending on almost every city in the Bay Area, with its volunteers who will plant trees in school yards and give students a crash course in eating organic.

Everywhere except San Francisco, that is.

Leo Buc, spokesman for the Fruit Tree Tour, tells SF Weekly, that its veggie oil-powered buses are bypassing the City by the Bay simply because, well, school officials showed no interest in hosting the annual tree-planting tour.

"We go where schools book us," he said. "They didn't books us."

To be fair, San Francisco schools have hosted four tours in the past, yet school officials have not responded to SF Weekly explaining why they aren't interested this year.

It's the 8th annual tree-planting roadshow, which includes a theatrical troupe of volunteers who use music and drama to teach kids about sustainable food and how to downsize their carbon footprint with composting.

The volunteers, who are from the nonprofit Common Vision, then work with the kids to plant fruit trees -- as many as 100. This becomes their school orchard.

The tour is headed to California this week, hitting public schools in Los Angeles, San Diego, Palo Alto, Oakland, and Berkeley.

"There is wisdom in the old saying 'an apple a day keeps the doctor away,'" said Megan Watson, the tour director. "An industrial diet of processed foods in making American kids unnaturally sick and fat, resulting in a national epidemic of childhood diabetes and obesity."

And San Francisco is no exception.

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© 2003-2020 Common Vision