Eating cherries and strawberries found along a public path will soon be on the menu for people taking a stroll in one Scarborough park.

This past fall, the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC) unveiled a 500-metre-long accessible trail that connects the university to the nearby city-maintained trails in the Highland Creek valley. Along the main part of the trail, hundreds of shrubs and perennial edible garden plants have been added, as well as a dozen black cherry and black walnut trees.

All of which, once they’re ready for harvest, will be available for picking at the edge of the pathway for anyone walking by.

Daniel Bender, director of the culinary research centre at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC), hopes the new edible plant-filled trail will be the beginning of a big change in how campuses and cities see their relationship to parks and ravines in the 21st century.

“It’s worth rethinking,” says Bender, as cities face challenges of increasing densification, urbanization and issues around resiliency and climate change.

“If this gets us thinking about how we can redevelop relationships to land and food in ways that are healthier to land and people and animals and all the other things, then I think that’s a really positive outcome.”

The trail, which is open to the UTSC community as well as the general public, is along the Highland Creek ravine adjacent to the Scarborough campus, just off Morningside Avenue. With the exception of people using mobility devices, the trail is walk-only and does not allow biking, skateboarding or rollerblading.

Once the shrubs and fruit are ready to be harvested, the university says it will install various signage along the trail to communicate to the public what is safe to eat.

While it’s too early to project the outcome of this edible planting innovation, Bender hopes it will provide a learning experience on how cities approach the design of their parks.

Toronto features vast numbers of trails in its parks and ravines, but none of them have edible plants and fruit trees that are specifically meant for human picking and eating.

“While the city does not engage in edible plant horticulture on its trails for public consumption, we do plant a number of native tree and shrubs in parks and natural areas that produce edible fruit, such as raspberry, serviceberry, and blackberry,” wrote city spokesperson Shane Gerard in an email to the Star.

“This is for the purpose of natural wildlife habitat restoration and species diversity to support biodiversity — which provides benefits to Toronto's native birds and wildlife.”

Gerard said the city directs residents who are interested in picking fruits to Not Far From the Tree, a fruit picking and sharing charity, in an effort “to avoid the consumption of hazardous plants and disturbance to natural areas.”

Bender said he doesn’t know any other place where a public trail is surrounded by edible plants, but added Canadian universities are slowly picking up the idea of campus farming — with initiatives such as campus gardens and green rooftops becoming all too common at various colleges and universities.

He believes the UTSC innovation represents “an important step” in thinking through the architectural design of a university campus in the coming decades. The addition of these plants on the new trail is part of the school’s Edible Campus Initiative, a broad undertaking that’s all about placing food production, consumption and teaching into the central part of campus development.

“What we’re talking about is something that looks a bit more like the environmental rehabilitation at the same time that’s also about sustainability and thinking about a place within a natural food system,” he said.

“What do we want students to get out of university and can the old vision of gothic architecture do it?”

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To that end, Bender envisions a time when students are “not restricted” to classrooms when it comes to doing research on food and plants. He hopes to see the study of food integrated at the centre of the humanities and biological and environmental sciences.

“Why isn’t being able to taste the difference between a store-bought, industry-grown raspberry and a raspberry right off the bush, why isn’t that an important learning outcome?” he asks.

“I think it’s hugely important. And it not only helps the student in terms of the sheer brain power, it also helps in terms of producing students that are just fundamentally healthier.”