God preserve me from the hell of a pick-your-own farm
Pity the poor grape pickers of Épernay, advised now by the Comité Champagne not to drink wine while harvesting. The champagne producers’ committee has just published a good practice guide to safeguard the welfare of the 120,000 pickers who work their way up and down the vines of eastern France come autumn, collecting grapes to be crushed and made into the fizzy stuff.
It’s relentless hard work. And when one starts picking, one must pick until the job is done, come rain or shine. Leave the fruit on for too long and Krug will be making a vin de paille, which isn’t quite the biscuity brioche sparkling its customers have in mind.
The committee suggests its pickers have a “solid breakfast”, wear suncream and sun-protective clothing, go to bed at a “reasonable hour” and drink water rather than wine. Which seems a little churlish; a rather kill-joy attitude to the job and I speak with experience. Aged 17, I did “les vendanges” – the harvest – in Epernay, specifically for a champagne house called Beaumet, with the idea of improving my spoken French. We slept in dormitories, we worked from dawn ‘til dusk, and they only relented to giving us waterproof clothing after two days of torrential rain when we threatened to go on strike.
We chatted, sang and laughed, my French improved drastically, we were well fed and at lunch and dinner we drank champagne. It was like eating chocolate at a chocolate factory. Novel and fabulous at the start and then we got used to it. But unlike the chocolate factory, we never tired of it. Fuelled by the fizz, we merrily picked ‘til evening, and then they poured us more fizz. It softened the brutal labour of the day. And picking is brutal. You squat as you work yourself along the line, so it’s murder on the calves and torture for the back. I figured a way of sitting on my crate, of cutting off the grapes, dropping them in, then hopping up and shifting the crate along under me. I’d converse with the picker opposite me and by the time we reached the end of the line, we’d know one another’s life history.
But I wouldn’t do it again. As I’ve done it, I’m more than happy just to sip the stuff. And when anyone talks of picking with some sort of whiff of romance I won’t have any of it. Especially at this time of year, in England, when the greatest con in farming is bandied about as if it’s some merry, frolicking jaunt. Yes, I’m talking of the pick-your-own experience.
My parents used to suggest it as a summer holiday activity. Fun for all the family. You fetch up at a farm, get some punnets, then take home piles of strawberries that cost far less than those sold in the shops.
And there’s good reason for this as the strawberry growers have managed to convince the idiot family pickers that this is jolly recreation and it involves strawberries, about which there is no downside. Unlike regular strawberry picking, which is well documented: hordes of migrants, housed in static caravans, picking for dear life, under threat of severe retribution should they dare eat a single pseudocarp. And as famously described in the brilliant novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian.
But at the pick-your-own farm, we child pickers weren’t just labourers, we were slaves. Unpaid serfs, crouching and picking and doing so to the point that we all hated strawberries and it took decades of Pimm’s and lashings of cream and sugar to restore their reputation.
We agreed to pick because we liked strawberries. And it was one for the punnet, one for the mouth. We’d attempt to secrete the strawberries into our gobs without getting busted but it was pretty clear after half an hour of picking who the thieves were. Our punnets were half full and our mouths were stained red.
An argument would then ensue about the theft, the eagle-eyed farmer, Mr McGregor to our thieving Peter Rabbit, would then charge for the stolen ones, we’d all retreat to the car in a huff, endure a silent drive home and hope to God we’d not see a damn strawberry for the rest of the summer.
Even now, if I pass a pick-your-own farm, the terror returns. I feel I should stop the car and man a picket line. “Don’t do it. Don’t traumatise your kids. This farmer is a conman. You’ll be his slaves. It’s cheaper for him to use you to pick his fruit than it is for him to pay for the labour. Do you want to enslave your own children? Of course not. You’ll hate strawberries and your children will hate you. Screw the cost, just go and buy a pack at Waitrose.”
