Have you heard about the Beacon Food Forest? It sounds really, really cool. The possible problem, per the Atlantic:

Of course, any "free" food source begs the question of what to do with overzealous pickers. No definitive answer on how to handle that predicament has been established yet, though. According to Herlihy, the only solutions right now are to produce an abundance of fruit so there's enough for everyone and to embed "thieves' gardens" with extra plants in the park for those people eager to take more than their share.

...but all the city's P-Patches (of which the planned Food Forest is a part) seem to do all right contending with that potential issue... and a program in a small town in England has had to urge people to come and take the produce.

“What we found was that in the first 18 months or two years nobody picked anything,” says Pam Warhurst, originator of the Incredible Edible Todmorden project. “We had to keep saying to them, go on, it’s fine, you can help yourself. Eventually people got the knack of it."

Seattle is just as polite as an English village. (And as unaccustomed to picking fruit and vegetables for free—I wonder how much of the hesitation is "but it might be DIRTY!"-related.)

Also, if you need it that bad, take it. That's kind of the point, isn't it?