Free the fruit

You know, having grown up in a family where I was herded into the fields¹ every summer to pick fruit, I am still astonished that there are actually people out there who will pay for the privilege of doing so. There's a reason they used to have big parties to celebrate the end of the harvest season: harvesting things is not fun. Eating things you've harvested is fun. But the actual harvesting part is dull, repetitive labor that is amusing only for the hordes of bugs that feast on you while you do it. I mean, a day in the country is nice . . . but it's even nicer when you're not bent into an unnatural position, desperately trying to free all the fruit from some spectacularly dull-looking specimen of plant life which is doing its passive aggressive best to defeat you.

¹Okay, my grandfather's multi-acre garden. You try explaining the difference to a ten-year old.

Comments

The secret is to net the strawberries. Then 10- year olds will look upon the whole thing as huge fun, a bumper obstacle race, and a game of "commandos".

Posted by dearieme | October 9, 2007 4:24 PM

You could have combined the content of this post with a take on how the crops are "rotting in the fields" for want of illegal immigrant fruit pickers.

Posted by Fred | October 9, 2007 4:30 PM

As an elementary school student in Connecticut some of my friends and schoolmates had older siblings who had worked summers picking shade-grown tobacco on the farms north of Hartford. The practice of hiring young people had ended just a few years before me and my classmates reached the minimum age of 14. While the work paid well, far more than just about any alternatives available at that age, everyone who had done it absolutely loathed the experience. It was hot, dirty, backbreaking work.

Posted by Peter | October 9, 2007 4:31 PM

Whatever, I still wish my grandfather had a "multi-acre garden."

Posted by southpaw | October 9, 2007 4:36 PM

It's fun to go pick a bowl of raspberries to have with breakfast for 20 minutes, it's no fun to pick berries for 12 hours a day when you're paid by the pound. Not to mention that fruit right off the tree/vine is tasty and better for you.

Posted by JordanT | October 9, 2007 4:46 PM

It can be a novel experience for a kid to see that fruit actually comes from real live plants, not bins in supermarkets. And you can't really beat the freshness.

Posted by sasha | October 9, 2007 4:50 PM

So you would support a farmworkers union? Or am I totally out of line?

Posted by Alan Vanneman | October 9, 2007 5:09 PM

I agree with Fred's comment. For all this talk of how without illegal immigrants the crops won't get harvested, there seems to be plenty of well-heeled yuppies right here in the States willing to do the job -- for free! Let's build that fence, and let rich city-folk harvest the fruited plain!

Posted by Kyle | October 9, 2007 5:13 PM

It is funny that you blogged this today. The Saturday before last, I had the first opportunity in many years (over 25) to help my grandfather pick beans from his garden. Since I and one of my sisters arrived at the end of the picking, we only got to do it for just over an hour or so before the picking was done. I am in very good physical condition, but that hour by itself left me aching in the back, and because I stretched to pick beans from both sides of the vines, my hamstrings were sore for days afterwards. I can't imagine doing that for a living.

Posted by Yancey Ward | October 9, 2007 5:24 PM

Your childhood would have been better if grandpa had cut a corn maze. Everything is more fun if a corn maze is also involved. My wife and I took our two boys apple picking this weekend. We picked 10 pounds in a half hour, walked the corn maze, bought some very yummy BBQ sauce, and picked 70 lbs of pumpkins. A good time was had by all. Megan just grew up on the wrong farm. Maybe they can put a corn maze in the Atlantic parking lot.

Posted by Citizen (World) | October 9, 2007 5:29 PM

I am still astonished that there are actually people out there who will pay for the privilege of doing so.

As I believe a well-known American once remarked, Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Posted by Kieran | October 9, 2007 5:35 PM

This is why animals harvest only for the day and immediately eat the fruits. (Unless of course they live in Northern climates and hibernate over winter. In which case they harvest and consume more than their daily needs but not much more.)

Apes have evolved for steady climates where trees keep fruits much fresher than any refrigerator could ever?

Posted by Hugo Pottisch | October 9, 2007 5:42 PM

We are not paying to labor, we are paying for the produce. We are paid for our labor with discount produce. Now, maybe you think your time is worth more than the discount, but that is different that what you said.
Then again, I like being out for as long as I like, picking what I want.

Posted by anomdebus | October 9, 2007 6:28 PM

Picking apples makes for a great date-- relaxed, laid back, cheap. You get to talk and walk around, it's great to be in an orchard on a beautiful fall day, you have something to do to break up any awkward silences. Plus you get the whole fall thing, with the sweaters and the leaves and the smoke smell in the air. It's perfect.

This is why animals harvest only for the day and immediately eat the fruits.

I sometimes wonder if Hugo is someone doing a character of a really committed animal rights advocate. (No offense, Hugo.)

Posted by Freddie | October 9, 2007 6:33 PM

No offense taken, Freddie.

You can call it a type of humor...

Posted by Hugo Pottisch | October 9, 2007 9:05 PM

Sounds like the Emancipation Proclamation sucked for your family.

Posted by Abe Lincoln | October 10, 2007 2:36 AM

All my sympathy. Sure harvesting for a short period of time is no problem and I like picking peas for diner, but it gets very old very fast. Personally I found haying worse, but that could be mostly due to haying being done in long shifts while harvesting was only 2-4 hours at a time (thank you truancy laws). On the bright side when I was doing factory line work at nights in college it was almost interesting by comparison and far less physically taxing.

Posted by one of many | October 10, 2007 3:00 AM

I grew up on a small cherry farm. Fortunately we didn't actually have to live off of it - Dad taught at the community college - but before mechanical picking came in in the 70's, PYO was what kept the cherry orchards on the verge of breaking even. Migrant labor families worked quickly and efficiently, getting darned near every cherry on the trees, and making a pretty good income when they worked, but their piecemeal pay often amounted to half of what we got for the cherries at the cannery - and our farm was too small to allow setting up a camp for migrants, so we usually couldn't hire enough of them. Local labor worked for the same piecemeal rate, but were often slow, left the treetops unpicked, or broke down branches climbing on them rather than using the ladders.

PYO-ers paid more for the cherries than the canneries would, and did the work themselves, not much worse than the local labor - and they went away happy. It certainly was hard to understand people having fun doing that miserable, hot, sticky job. OTOH, when I was picking, I was usually getting the absolute worst part of the job - reaching the cherries that workers had left at the top or middle of the tree, but mainly there's a big, big difference between doing something for half an hour and doing it all day...

Posted by markm | October 10, 2007 8:50 AM

And Freddie wonders why I stopped going out with him.

Posted by One of Freddie's Dates | October 10, 2007 2:22 PM

Genesis:
"When Eve, and then Adam, ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge (3:6), after being tempted by a serpent (3:1–5), they became aware of their nakedness (3:7), and were banished from the garden and forced to survive through agriculture "by the sweat of [their] face" (Genesis 3:19-24)

Hesiod:
At a meal marking the "settling of accounts" between mortals and immortals, Prometheus plays a trick against Zeus (545-557). He places two sacrificial offerings before the Olympian: a selection of ox meat hidden inside its stomach (nourishment hidden inside a displeasing exterior), and the ox's bones wrapped in "glistening fat" (something inedible hidden inside a pleasing exterior). Zeus chooses the latter, setting a precedent for future sacrifices; henceforth, humans would keep the meat for themselves and burn the bones wrapped in fat as an offering to the gods. This angers Zeus, who hides fire from humans in retribution. Prometheus, however, steals fire from Zeus and gives it back to humans for their use.

Not only does Zeus withhold fire from men, but "the means of life," as well (42). Had Prometheus not provoked Zeus' wrath (44-47), "you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full year even without working; soon would you put away your rudder over the smoke, and the fields worked by ox and sturdy mule would run to waste."

____________________

I think that we come close to rediscovering what the Greek creation myth was about (Zeus, fire, animal sacrifice, laboring the fields) and the "Tree of Knowledge".

Add a bit of Thoreau, Darwin and other naturalist like E O Wilson (Biophila) and we have a clear path towards adding meaning to religion and science for the first time since we started believing that man has freed himself from the laws of nature and from the rest of Creation.

It does not matter if you approach this via religion or science - both mean the same using different terminology.

We know how to reach Eden, the kingdom of sustainability, and and how to avoid punishment or self-destruction (depending on your world-view: religion or science).

Christians and other one god religions (like Islam and Judaism) have to lose their fear of paganism.

Science has to lose its fear of not being omnipotent too. To accept the fact that we are only part of the whole and therefore, by definition, cannot know it all... but we can love the process as philo sophia. It is better to be realistic than to be wishful!

Unless we accept the natural laws and complexity that governs us - we will find it hard to reach our potential in every possible respect. Material and spiritual!

I am aware that this might not make much sense for many readers - I am leapfrogging some reasoning (on purpose). I am aware that I risk coming across as a wannabe know-it all. That I run the risk of sounding "everything we do is wrong"... I do not believe that I know it all. I do not think that we do everything wrong. But I am deeply convinced that we, as part of the whole, do not know it all and that we have lost a valuable awareness regarding our role in the universe and especially on earth.

I am genuinely interested to hear what "spirituality" means to commenter here.

Posted by Hugo Pottisch | October 10, 2007 2:27 PM