Fabian and I went to the Charlottesville Saturday 19 October 2019 morning farmer’s market. We met Andy there, a CHUVA former resident and regular, and bought some of his dried peppers. He had grown 50 different types and was still producing peppers, and he had given some to us for Thursday night pizza. Dried ones are more difficult to produce and I buy these anyway, so was happy to get some from him. He told his about the process for making them, and that since he used his own oven the utility bill went up and overall he thought making more dried peppers by this method was not profitable.
There was a booth for Carter Mountain Apple Orchard. We were less interested in the apples and more in the applewood, which is a favorite for our chinchillas. They said that they had no wood available, nor would they ever, nor could they ship any by request. That was fine, and we did not expect them to be ready for a rodent market when they have other priorities. We took their brochure and went for coffee.
We had our day then toward evening time we decided to visit Carter Mountain. We knew apples were in season and I knew the place to be a visitor attraction, but I had never visited. I did not realize that it was so accessible and set up for guests. The people at the farmer’s market said there was no applewood but it we expected a different story if we went there, and the chinchillas would appreciate anything. We thought to check it out ourselves. When we arrived we asked about applewood and the staff directed us to wander through the orchard and collect sticks, and that we could have them. It was apple season and there were apples everywhere. There were tens of thousands on the ground intact, fallen from the tree or discarded for minor blemishes. Probably hundreds of thousands of apples end up this way. It seems like a huge waste, and I thought surely it would be better to collect them and do anything with them than leave them to rot. The financial model of Carter Mountain is to sell by the weight, and a picked apple costs the same as an apple from the ground, so visitors almost exclusively will pick and let any loose apples fall without noticing.
Amid truckloads of edible, tasty apples which had been on the ground for a few days at most and left to rot, there were signs claiming that this was a family-run orchard and that families could eat one apple to taste while picking in the orchard, but the second apple they ate would be theft. Obviously there were more apples on the ground consigned to mud than there could be families visiting. I also questioned what it means to have a family business. Surely whomever operated this orchard was among the wealthier residents of the town. The workers were not family, but people from the community, and although I appreciate locally owned businesses there is no custom of transparency of business practices to grow faith in what is local versus other models. Seeing the signs made me wish that the orchard were run as a park in a public trust with some community ownership model. I felt accused by a sign which said to not eat any apples in a Grapes of Wrath context where all the food is going to waste to prevent it from entering the marketplace and disrupting other sales. I wish that it were not so politicized to remark when capitalism creates systems when the path to financial gain is to destroy valuable goods only to manipulate the market. I took more than one of the discarded apples from the ground and ate to my satisfaction.
We had our sticks and we went to check out with a few apples. We asked if we should pay for sticks and the checkout boy told us to have them for free. We had about 10 sticks all in a backpack, poking out. I purchased the apples and began to exit, then one of the employees confronted us as if for theft and told use we had to pay for the sticks. I explained that two people told us we could have them, and he said they sold firewood. I actually wanted a log, not sticks, and asked him to buy firewood. He pointed us to a place and we found a log which we thought would sit stable in various orientations and be comfortable for the chinchillas to hop onto. We brought the log back, and the guy who confronted us wanted us to check out in his line. He had us weigh the log and asked for $7.50. This was fine for us and a chinchilla, but upon checking the receipt, the expense line noted that he charged the price for half a bushel which is a pile of firewood.
Fabian and I have purchased sticks online at much greater cost plus shipping at high cost. These are for the entertainment of the chinchillas so money is not a great concern. I did feel like the farm was a bit disrespectful in general – why should a family assert generations of ownership over a natural environment which should be a shared community resource? If they are the stewards, then why present the place requests for peer to peer respect among poor equals, and assume that visitors are thieves, and leave the waste, and charge us the price of several logs for a single one? I do not fault the owners exactly, but something about the entire business model seems like a part of American culture which I wish to reduce. Every aspect of a community should exist to encourage positivity in a community, and the nature of this orchard seemed positioned in conflict. A local apple orchard is no problem compared to national or international corporate monsters, and those monsters definitely do all these bad things to the greater detriment of society, but I still wish that we could develop society and technology to a point where people and culture and places and institutions aligned better with each other.