FACT CHECK: Is the surplus of apple harvest hung on fences for other needy people in Norway? Here’s the Truth..

Scandinavian countries are often considered as developed countries with high quality of living and are ranked among top countries in indexes such as the human development index of the United Nations, etc. Hence, various social media posts about these countries get shared occasionally with misleading narrations. This is our investigation related to one of such misleading claims about a Scandinavian country, Norway.

Social Media Posts

A Facebook user shared a photo of apple bags being hanged on the fence of a house with the following narration.

“#Norway When people see they have an excess of apples on their property trees, they do these kinds of actions so others can take and consume them instead of rotting on the ground. It's called First and it's called World.”

Facebook | Archived

Many other Facebook users have commented and few extracted comments are mentioned below.

We detected that viral social media claims like such being spread throughout Facebook space like this.

Due to the curious nature of these posts, we decided to do an investigation about this.

Fact Check

We started our investigation with a Google Reverse Image search and were able to find the details related to this image.

We found an article in a website of a local newspaper in Norway named as Drammens Tidende related to charitable work.

According to the newspaper report, this task is not common to the whole Norway, but specific to the one generous lady named Inger Garas.

Drammens Tidende| Archived

The Google translation of the newspaper report says about why she was giving apple bags to others who passed her fence. - “There are so many apples this year. Nice, clean and big. I cannot use everything, and it will be too much fun to throw it away. Then it is much better to give them away, says the generous lady.”

She told the newspaper article which was published in September, 2018 that she had donated around 200 bags in a week and it's around 200 kilos in those days.

And she further added that the apple trees of her garden were large and old as those were planted around 1854.

“I continue this process as long as there are apples,” she told the newspaper.

This is not a common incident in Norway which catches the attention of local media also. So, it’s some unique to this generous lady.

We have contacted Garas to know whether she is still continuing her charity works. According to her responses, this article will be updated.

Another fact check over the same post can be reached from here.Archived.

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Conclusion

According to our investigation, we found out that the apple donation which is claimed as a country wide practice in Norway, was actually a generous act done by a lady called Inger Garas. It depicts her generousness, but this is not a common practice across Norway.