This article is copied from Slate magazine. Author is Tom Joudrey.
I thought the article funny, but also pretty brutally honest. The title of the article is in the topic. The text is listed here below:
"I grew up on a 64-acre apple orchard in rural Ohio. To reveal my origin story to a new acquaintance is inevitably to watch their pupils dilate as they picture bucolic scenes of fruit-laden trees, decorative cornstalks, tractor-pulled hayrides, and caramel-doused apples plunked onto sticks. Orchards, I’ve come to see, are like catnip to the imaginations of boho-chic suburbanites, TikTokking wanderlusters, and harried parents on the edge of a nervous breakdown. If apple pie enjoys symbolic stature as the wholesome, patriotic dessert of America, the orchard is its hallowed birthplace and cradle—a mythical agricultural space that conjures bygone days of bliss and childhood innocence.
What sometimes plays out at my family’s orchard on a weekend in October, however, makes unruly passenger incidents on airplanes seem like the stuff of Edwardian garden parties. Consider the Champagne-soused bridezilla who pulled up to our orchard unannounced on a 57-seat passenger bus and rampaged through rows of Pink Lady alongside a retinue of drunken bridesmaids. More common are the helicopter moms who abruptly discover the virtues of free-range parenting as their feral hellions tear the crop from the trees and turn our livelihood into disposable wartime ammunition.
You’re wondering: Can it really be that bad? I’ll let you judge. I’m dropping down an insider’s ladder to the Tree of Knowledge. Climb at your own peril.
My parents bought their orchard in 1989. By elementary school, I was devoting spring weekends to hanging hundreds of bags of human hair on saplings to ward off bud-chomping deer. Ill-timed heavy rains would nullify their effectiveness, so by the time I entered high school, these foul-smelling sacks of tresses were supplanted by hotel-size bars of Dial soap. On other grueling days, I wrapped tree trunks in protective plastic to repel groundhogs. Smoke bombs tossed and sealed into burrows were a more permanent deterrent, disabusing me of any tender notions of pastoral tranquility. So too did the nearly 30 bee stings I endured in the summer of 1991.
Peach fuzz for me was not a marker of pubescence, but a very literal itch-inducing, orifice-infesting living nightmare that accreted over hours during the laborious process of thinning marble-sized peaches from trees. An ominous reprieve came when we had no peaches at all: A late-spring cold snap or other weather aberration destroyed the crop on the order of once every three years. A stone’s throw over, creeping brown rot and thieving crows competed to be first to strangle or snatch away the bulk of the cherries.
My point is that grinding out a living as a farmer was no cakewalk, but in the ’90s, our die-hard customers were hip to agricultural travails. These were often tough-as-nails, penny-pinching German and Eastern European immigrants who saved 10 cents per pound by marching down the lane themselves to pick their own sour cherries. Without fail, these women would snap open their change purses and count out the payment in coins to the precise cent. (They also dispensed terrifying folk wisdom, as when one caught me biting my nails: “You’ll get holes in your stomach.”)
How’d we go from the quaint country stores of the 1980s to today’s over-the-top agritainment theme parks?
For one thing, the apple industry was waylaid by a scene-chewing Meryl Streep. In February 1989, “60 Minutes” aired a controversial report warning that daminozide, a chemical applied to apples to regulate growth and enhance color, had been flagged in a small, preliminary study as a carcinogen. Streep took to the pages of People magazine to send up a bloodcurdling warning flare to mothers: “My kids have been part of the great Daminozide experiment, and I have been an unwitting accomplice.”
The accomplice part was right: Playing Brutus for a day, she’d left a paring knife in the apple industry’s back.
I laugh about it now, but the brutal reality was that the panic tanked sales, and years of smoldering controversy drove new demand for organic foods. In tandem with this disaster, the consolidation of agro-industry meant that as regional grocers went under in the 1990s, small orchards like ours could no longer compete with large-scale producers.
Yeoman apple farmers found a narrow lane for survival in the wake of this publicity nightmare as wellness-conscious consumers grew incrementally more suspicious of corporations and chose to “buy local” from trusted growers. We pivoted to farm-market retail and you-pick options that located value in the immersive experience, rather than the agricultural product. Our seasonal festivals now featured corn mazes, face painting, pony rides, rotten-apple slingshots, and—my favorite—a cosplaying Johnny Appleseed who looked suspiciously like the same bloke who introduced himself as Meriwether Lewis to my too-credulous sixth-grade class.
The pivot worked. By 2022, U.S. farms and ranches were raking in $1.26 billion in revenue from agritourism, which opened up far wider price margins than growers could command through wholesale or straightforward farm markets.
What turns these expeditions from frothy cider to acrid vinegar is that visitors in the new theme-park era arrive expecting a prelapsarian Eden—a paradise of harmony and abundance, torqued into a highly exclusive, vaguely exotic, White Lotus–like luxury experience.
The results are hair-raising. I’ve watched visitors arrive in four-inch stilettos and totter across gravel parking lots to end up dodging belching farm equipment amid din and dust and screaming children. One elaborately coiffed guest recently groused that the recently mowed grass was “too high” for her liking and demanded that it be trimmed. Meanwhile, oblivious influencers tramp at will across all corners of the orchard like marauding billionaires on safari, occasionally snapping whole branches from trunks in hapless attempts to play Tarzan.
This mix of fantasy and entitlement reaches its zenith in the mayhem of harvest time, when pick-and-split bandits drive in, fill grocery bags, and speed away with their arboreal plunder. The kicker is that many of them don’t even regard it as theft because—you guessed it—apples just grow on trees.
What’s lost to theft pales in comparison to what gets carelessly destroyed as detritus. I’ve seen it play out hourly like a broken record: You-pickers top off their bags, grow covetous at the sight of one more big, beautiful, spotless apple—and dump the entire bag onto the ground to start afresh with a more discriminating eye. Like a demoralized Jesus on water, I can often walk atop discarded apples from end to end of a you-pick row without ever setting foot on grass.
Some of the chaos I’ve witnessed bears no trace of malice or even negligence. I once had a customer rave that “bugs” had broken into the honey. It took me a few volleys of clarification to figure out that he’d been staring pensively at the observation beehive.
At their best, local orchards offer a precious opportunity to step away from the scrappy rat race of modern life. Still, when our job devolves into corralling plastered Eves in tiaras, something’s gone wildly awry.
So, if you’re gearing up for an outing this autumn, I leave you with three takeaways, boiled down like jars of caramelized apple butter. Dissuade your little buggers from flinging apples at each other, strap on some sensible walking shoes, and please do pay for that peck of Pazazz. And with that, we might just thrive together in this postlapsarian orchard."
