A salty take on apple picking

With apologies for yucking a yum

Last time I promised something salty, so buckle up:

I find apple picking as an autumn activity bizarre.

Before we get into this, know that I am generally hesitant to yuck someone’s yum. (I non-ironically enjoy Provel, who am I to look down on your food choices?) If a day spent in an idealized version of rural America picking apples sounds like fun to you, know that this is not a personal attack on your character.

Apples growing in South Hero, VT

On the one hand, the farmers chose to offer apple picking: it’s a way to make money in a system that can otherwise fail you, especially if you’re a small grower seeing all your neighbors gobbled up by commercial farms. But people coming to the country for a day don’t always understand the hours of back-breaking work to tend the orchards, work often done by immigrants or migrants, work that’s only getting more difficult with climate change.

It feels similar to how people want an “authentic” experience when they travel, but they end up being fed a version of what they think is authentic, that is, something based on idealized images from the past.

In the case of apples, to quote this apple picking take published last year in Vox:

America’s embrace of apple picking may have been aided by its accelerated promotion of autumn as what Jezebel’s Hazel Cills, in “How America Invented the White Woman Who Just Loves Fall,” described as “a season for the nation to collectively get nostalgic for its own beginnings.” Twentieth-century cultural arbiters from Norman Rockwell to Martha Stewart helped fashion the season’s trappings into a celebrated aesthetic of rustic simplicity. Activities like apple picking, Cills wrote, allow “white-collar city dwellers to play-act a pastoral fantasy.” (As Cills notes, much of this aesthetic is rooted in a nostalgia for the whiteness of a certain era.)

The whole article is worth your time — come for the take on apple picking, stay for the discussion of labor issues and history of apples in this country. A few other reads on the subject, if you're interested: “What Do Professional Apple Farmers Think of People Who Pick Apples for Fun?” in the Atlantic, and “The surprising history of America’s ‘pick-your-own’ farms” in National Geographic.

Crab apples outside Biglerville, PA

When we lived in DC for 10 years, Braeden and I worked at a farmers market, selling fruit from an orchard based in south central PA. And starting in July, that meant apples. (Some varieties of apples — Earligold, Yellow Transparent, Pristine — start ripening as soon as July, and it’s a mad dash from there to the end of the season as more and more varieties come to market, including everyone’s favorite: Honeycrisp. And if you think you detected a bit of saltiness directed at Honeycrisp’s beloved status, well, you wouldn’t be wrong!!!)

So I asked someone we worked with at the market, Phil, what he thinks about people who go apple picking. “I have fond memories from my childhood about apple picking,” he wrote back. “It was a yearly family fall activity. Looking back on it now, I think it’s a wonderful way to educate children on where their food comes from and the work it takes for apples to hit our pies and our tables.”

“I think some people still go apple picking to keep those family traditions alive,” he added, “especially when some of the family isn’t.”

A Fyrefly apple, grown only at Hollabaugh Brothers in Biglervile, PA. They’re juicy, fairly crisp, and sweet-tart.

This was not a perspective I had considered, really, because, dear reader, I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder, thus the saltiness. (Show me a chip that isn’t better with salt! You can’t!)

The chip is the same one held by anyone who didn’t grow up in a city or suburb who eventually transplanted to one (or went to a college where most people were from one) and then spent years trying to not feel inferior, to catch up (to what exactly? I still don’t know). This chip makes me very sensitive to quips and assumptions about people who live in tiny towns or on farms.

And when it comes to farmers, people from less rural areas make some, um, interesting assumptions.

An example: when my family still lived on a farm in eastern Washington, my sister worked at the snack counter of a local park/resort frequented by people from the coast — i.e. people from Seattle — and some guy asked what she did for fun, implying that we all lived in such a boring, rural area, we must be starved for entertainment, we must not have any culture, we must be dumb rural folk. “We go cow tipping,” she replied, deadpan, without hesitation.

(I could go on about misplaced assumptions people have about farms/rural areas, but we’ll shelve that for now. Let’s get back to these apples.)

A classic example of a snobby book-smart guy making assumptions about someone they deem beneath them, as well as a nice display of toxic masculinity by both parties. How you like them apples?

Do I want you to feel bad for enjoying picking your own apples? No, I do not. I, too, am ready for sweater weather and flannel everything. I am not immune to the pull of pumpkins and spooky szn.

I just want you to have more context should you decide to do it.

Apples growing on the Gettysburg battlefield (speaking of places people venture to for nostalgia!!!)

Now that we live in Colorado, I miss having access to the perfection known as apples from the East Coast apple capital, Adams County, PA. We brought a bag back with us, which I am hoarding in a delicate dance — I want to enjoy them for as long as possible, but the longer we keep them, the more likely they’ll go soft. (PSA: for the love of all things autumnal, store your apples in the refrigerator if you want them to stay crisp and fresh. Decay doesn’t care about your cute bowl of fruit on the kitchen counter.)

But you know what? I also don’t want to have access to everything, everywhere, all at once. On a basic level, if I can get the food unique to a region no matter where I am, it loses its luster. (From a less basic standpoint, here’s Alicia Kennedy on regionality.)

Are there apple orchards in Colorado? Yes. Are the apples as good? …no, at least not that I’ve found in my limited time here. (I am so happy to be proven wrong, though.) The peaches are a whole other story — Palisades are truly dreamy — but I’m more of an apple gal anyway.

So instead of adding apples to everything, I will now embrace something that Colorado and the Southwest does extremely well: chiles.

More on that next time.

“A Family Picks Apples Right From The Tree” by Emily Flake in the New Yorker, November 2nd, 2015.

P.S. Speaking of the New Yorker, here’s another (satirical but also… maybe…not?) take on apple picking from fellow Dickinsonian Eddie Small: “There’s no better way to embrace autumn than by picking apples in temperatures that remind you that the genuinely comfortable part of the season now lasts for only about three hours, all of which you will spend inside working.”