WWOOF Italy: Reaping the Fruits of Someone Else's Labor So Someone Else Can Reap the Fruits of Mine

15 April 2011

It is early April on the farm: planting time. It is time to prepare the garden, collect the compost, and plant the seeds. In the summer, all farmers will add new seeds at precisely chosen intervals, tend to the growing plants, and in the fall, abundance comes. Apples and figs fall from trees that you almost forgot you had. Olives, grapes and almonds are ready to be picked. The vegetables that you collect from your garden are bright: purples, reds, white, all shades of green.

Then will come the panick: what do we do with all of this food? The fruits from the trees need to be picked before they fall to a bruised and splattered ruin. The vegetables in the garden need to be picked before they wilt or are taken over by nature’s molds and insects. Soon the rush to pick, clean, prepare, can, dry and give away as gifts begins. If you don’t make it in time, the fruits of your labor, sitting there in front of you today, will be lost tomorrow (it is some consolation to know that, in sustainable agriculture, its nutrients will go to the hens and back into the earth before they are lost or thrown away).

I will be here for none of this. I helped plant, prune trees, and spread compost now in the spring, but I will not watch the bounty grow in the summer nor taste the fruits in the fall. Another WWOOFer will be here then, tasting the fruits of my labor while laying the ground work for the fruits that the next WWOOFer will enjoy.

I, too, am enjoying the labors of someone else. Greens, grains and beans are the daily fair in this season. I eat grain [a half loaf of bread a day (a modest estimate), polenta (made out of the grain that makes the bread), or occasionally pasta]; an assortment of beans of all shapes and sizes; and an assortment of greens (we do our shopping every evening in the garden, selecting between wild greens and the remains from the winter that are still standing). Olive oil, wine, vinegar (made from old wine) and pepperoncino all add some flare, and that about sums up my eating experience here.

That aknowledged, I eat like a queen! Fresher, simpler ingredients, you have not tasted. Who would have expected flour cooked in water, eaten like oatmeal, to be good? That is the beauty of Italy: food grown with love on this terrain has a leg up on the same in most other parts of the world. If that same grain were purchased at a US supermarket it would be a flavorless mush; here the flavors of the organic, heritage grain grown 100 m away tell the stories of the earth beneath it.