Apple picking is a bizarre imitation of hard work

Vox.com ^ | Updated Oct 1, 2021, 9:00am EDT | By Dan Greene

[thecodont]

One afternoon a few Octobers ago, I sat with a friend from Spain at a picnic table in an idyllic orchard 50 miles northwest of New York City.

As our significant others scoured the farm’s various other goods (jams, butters, donuts), the two of us admired the vast green-and-red foliage blanketing the hills in the distance. Beside us were net bags filled with the dozens of apples we had collected by hand from the property’s dozens of rows of trees — a ritual and scene familiar to many Americans. My friend looked at the bags and gestured toward the sprawl of plants behind him. As enjoyable as the day had been, he found the activity a little weird. “In Spain, we have a lot of fruit,” he said of Europe’s top produce exporter. “But we don’t have anything like this.”

Through fresh eyes, the whole thing indeed seemed strange. Quality apples are generally easily available at grocery stores, and it’s not as though such heavily romanticized traditions are built around gathering other foods. (To wit, a 2015 New Yorker cartoon depicted a family picking apples with the caption: “Maybe next time we can go mine our own salt.”)

Yet apple picking has become an essential, Instagram-friendly element of America’s ever-expanding autumn industrial complex, alongside cable-knit sweaters and pumpkin-spice-everything. It’s a central seasonal activity among many American farms’ so-called “agritourism” or “agritainment” offerings, including hayrides, corn mazes, and petting zoos; between 2012 and 2017, the total US agritourism industry grew 35 percent to nearly $950 million a year.

[thecodont]

A leftist’s view and spin on seasonal rituals.

I wonder how much overlap there is between home gardeners/preppers and the people mentioned in this article. Hard work vs. the imitation of hard work.

Someone has commented on the presence of the suburban lawn as a yearning for past agricultural practices: fields to be maintained and tilled. In the autumn, at least in this country, people flock to the supermarket to decorate the porches of these same suburban homes with harvest artifacts: shocks of corn, huge irregular pumpkins, none of which were grown by the homeowner but are supposed to give the same sense of productivity and satisfaction.

[lee martell]

I guess one could write an article about most anything at all.

[GraceG]

Equator people are envious of the people who have seasonal festivals.

[AppyPappy]

Try growing weed. It’s a smelly business. Luckily, the leaves fell off by themselves so I didn’t have to trim.

[Steely Tom]

Another dope showing off his ignorance, thinking it’s wisdom and insight. Dunning-Kruger effect on display, as if we need another example; we’re drowning in Dunning-Kruger.

[thecodont]

Equator people are envious of the people who have seasonal festivals.

When I was a kid, we had a vegetable garden, so we knew how to grow pumpkins, but we also got to make an annual trip to the "pumpkin patch" miles away to pick out a Hallowe'en pumpkin and enjoy visiting the rest of the farm/produce stand. It was innocent and fun.

[Organic Panic]

Apple picking isn’t hard. You call up the labor broker and he shows up with 100 Mexicans. What’s hard about that?

[Organic Panic]

Apple picking isn’t hard. You call up the labor broker and he shows up with 100 Mexicans. What’s hard about that?

[556x45]

‘…ever-expanding autumn industrial complex’

Lol, wonder how long it took to think that one up. Perhaps it’s racist also, everything is these days.

[FreedomVsControl]

Wow what an idiot. Did he even bother to taste one of the apples, freshly picked off the tree????

[Billthedrill]

I should have stopped at "Vox.com" but I thought I'd humor the guy. It's the usual pseudo-intellectual drivel: nothing can simply be what it is, there are no innocent enjoyments, everything is a symbol of a deeper rot. The only pleasure these sourpusses get is in taking others' away. This, for example:

America’s ever-expanding autumn industrial complex

If Greene means that urbanized upper classes travel to the countryside for a bit of entertainment playing peasant he's at least 700 years too late. That pastime isn't anything uniquely American - neither are apples, as he relates - nor has the contrast between the two gone unnoticed since Giovanni Boccaccio. In Greene's eyes it's just another sign of the Oppression Of The Working Class, but it can be bent to other forms of resentment as well:

what Jezebel’s Hazel Cills, in “How America Invented the White Woman Who Just Loves Fall,”

Yep, it's racist and sexist as well as classist. Don't drink that pumpkin spice latte, kids, it's a sign of oppression! Anything you like is wrong!!

As for myself I ended up feeding most of my apples to the deer this year courtesy of some unfortunately timed weather, but when I think of the oppression of the working class - me - that saved, why, I'll just sit back and sip some autumn ale and enjoy the leaves. I'll feel appropriately guilty some other time.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Fascinating story…thanks for posting. Can the stat that workers are expected to pick 12,000 pounds of apples per day be right? That doesn’t seem humanly possible!

I ran my own hobby orchard do about a dozen apple, pear, plum, peach and apricot trees. It was so much work and I finally realized that my fruit was no better than the local fruit stand that I gave it up and pulled out the trees. Just thinning the apples in early March became a full-time chore over two weekends!

My great grandfather, his wife, and their kids ran a modest fruit ranch in southern BC. I found their fruit orchard census from 1920 not long ago. I sure got an appreciation for what they did after running my few trees.

[Huskrrrr]

Journalism. Beats working for a living.

[Liaison]

I see nothing wrong with some city folk getting out for air to pick apples and pay three times as much for the picking experience for a farm adventure. The farm’s love this income after the main harvest. The Loon that wrote this is to far shut up in his basement to really care about the topic other to make some crap social points that the rich are terrible to the poor working class.
I used to pick apples on weekends when I was in high school (1980s) and I got 50 cents a crate with usually 40-60 crates per tree for a big tree if I got one. Usually 20-30 boxes was the norm. The real pickers took all the good trees during the week leaving the school kids the smaller trees and the trees with the smaller apples. A crate size we used held about 6 milk jugs and we were not paid to fill a 1000 lbs crate as that size would damage that apples on the bottom. I guess that size was for apples heading to cider works where damaged apples are not an issue. It was still good money for me and I never saw any foreign pickers on the farms I picked in New England. I must have been in an old school bubble where the locals took care of themselves. For breaks we ate apples and cheese and washed it down with water or cider and ate a ploughman’s lunch. It was hard work and an experience that now is wonderful.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Can the stat that workers are expected to pick 12,000 pounds of apples per day be right?

No.

Not if he is talking per person and assuming a eight hour day.

If you are talking a 12 hour day it is possible depending on the types of apples you are picking.

If you know how to do it, you are picking juice apples and they are large apples you can pick a bin full in about an hour. A bin is about a thousand pounds of apples.

If you are picking eating apples and they are small it takes about an hour and a half for a good picker to pick a bins worth.

[Atomic Vomit]

This article proves commies really are out to ruin everyone’s good time.

Mrs AV

[PLMerite]

“Someone has commented on the presence of the suburban lawn as a yearning for past agricultural practices: fields to be maintained and tilled.”

I saw a show on the lawns and gardens of old English manor houses. The line of thought on this show was having a large grass lawn and ornamental plants, hedges, follies, etc., was a demonstration of wealth by not needing to have cash crops or pasture occupying every square foot of available land.

[kiryandil]

Quality apples are generally easily available at grocery stores

No, they're not.

I haven't bought an apple at a grocery store in decades.

Most of them are gassed garbage on their own little trays.

Of course, I was a wholesale produce manager in a past life, and got to order from the actual orchards themselves during the fall harvest.

[Karliner]

When people pick the harvest and don’t see the harsh work or drought, irrigation, pruning, praying for the winds not to knock off the blossoms, the birds, the floods, the heat and cold....the bills and fixing farm equipment, roofing the barn, buying a few new ladders,( on and on) then I wonder if they can ever truly appreciate the harvest? Do they know how hard it is to finance the trucking and selling of the produce and low prices?

Or do they expect every tree to render perfect fruit?

Farming and ranching is hard danged work. Everyone should experience it if just for a little while to remind them the blood sweat and tears of a good harvest should never be taken for granted...and that’s why I thank God for such things.