Erstellt am: 11. 11. 2009 - 13:40 Uhr
The Good Life
I had come to the farm near Mondaino to get "closer to the soil". Yet, as it had turned out, I was balancing perilously high above it, deep in the innards of a scratchy olive tree in the autumn browned-hills where Emilia-Romagna melts into Le Marche in central Italy.
chris cummins
With my foot wedged firmly in a fork of the gnarled old tree, and my hand resting one of its more solid looking branches I was precariously reaching up into the leaves with a rake. I could see a cluster of olives on a thinner branch. They were very blue looking in the dappled sunshine, almost like grapes.
I reached for the branch with the teeth of the rake and stroked them downwards, ripping through the sharp leaves. There were satisfying plopping sounds as several olives rained down into the net we had cast below. The purple fruits rolled down the steeply sloped ground like marbles before being caught in valley at the bottom of the net that we had created by staking with edges with sharpened sticks.
WWOOF
This was my second day as a WWOOFing volunteer. The rather canine acronym stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, a concept that first evolved in the UK in the 1970's but has seen a real boom in popularity in recent years.
As a wwoofer you toil unpaid in the fields for a number of hours a day and in return you get food and board at the farmhouse. Apart from the journey down, all I paid was a 25 euro membership fee to WOOF Italia, which covered insurance and a list of hundreds of possible placements.
chris cummins
With 6,000 hosts now dotted across 88 countries from New Zealand to Venezuela, you can see wwoofing prosaically as a very affordable way to see more of the world - like a more active form of rural couch surfing.
I met a pair of American wwoofers, freshly graduated students from California, working on a neighbouring farm who had arrived in Mondaino after a stretch of vegetable farming in Spain. They had then gathered grapes in France and the Piedmont in northern Italy. Next they were headed to the wild Abruzzo to tend goats and would from there go on to Sicily for the orange harvest. It sounded like the agricultural version of the Grand Tour.
If that sounds too tame, my olive picking mentor Basil had wwoofed himself in the Yukon in north-western Canada where he had worked in the cold mountains with a blind goat herd who could sense the terrain with his powers of hearing.
But for those of us in need of something greater to believe in than mere economic travel, WWOOF offers a glimpse of an alternative way of living - a more sustainable lifestyle that works with and not against nature. The wwoofers come from all over the world to learn at first-hand about organic growing. Working, cooking, eating and drinking side by side with their hosts, it's a multi-lingual experiment in communal living and cultural exchange.
Something to Believe In
My hosts were a couple of artists from England called Phelan and Suzie, Basil's parents, who had bought the land 23 years before with the intention of living off it sustainably. Phelan had the twinkling eyes of an incorrigible romantic and looked always on the brink of instigating a revolution for the sheer mischievous fun of it. He, a man who used to drive around in a van with a methane gas tank on the roof and doves of peace painted on the side, had embraced WWOOF as soon as he had heard of it - describing it over several glasses of delicious self-made red wine as "a sort of anarchy".
chris cummins
After encountering initial scepticism, he had seen his ideas of eschewing pesticides and insecticides, spread around his fellow farmers in the Mondaino area. He hoped the world-wide network of wwoofers would help disseminate organic ideals much further, like birds carrying seeds on their winter migrations. "Do you think in 10 years time wwoofing will be a really big movement?" he asked, pouring me another glass from a five-litre flask
"He lives in a house, a very big house..."
Well what vessel spreads ideas more effectively than through charm? The temporary home you share as a wwoofer can often be of an authentic beauty that no plush hotel could match except in pseudo-pastiche. The terracotta-roofed farmhouse in Mondaino was painted a pastel-shade of ochre that turned salmon pink in the bright sun. It was fronted by a handsome veranda fashioned by some felled tree trunks which had be entangled in yellowed vines. Inside the house a cosy yellow kitchen heated was by a wooden stove. Beside an open fire, with a chimney the shape of a witch’s hat, a large greyhound was usually folded yoga-like into a worn yellow armchair that was far too small for her.
Once, at lunch, a hen came through the front door and strutted nonchalantly around the room, casually ignored by the dog. Evidently bored by the lack of worms, grubs and attention, she stalked out again. It's true that on winter nights authentic farmhouses can be cold and draft-ridden as well as picturesque, but which of us doesn't need a touch of toughening up in this neurotic age?
chris cummins
Up my tree, meanwhile, I had a grandstand view of the natural beauty of the Italian countryside. Through the curtain of leaves, I looked back over the other blue-green trees in the grove, over the house, over the fruit-laden branches of a persimmon tree, over the yellow-parallel lines of the recently harvested vines, over the exploding colours of a copse of woods - foraged by truffle hunters - to the hills beyond.
These hills were ridged waves of green and brown that stretched as far as the high mountains of the Apennines. Tan hill-towns were surfing the crests of the waves and you could even see the spires of the Renaissance masterpiece Urbino in the distance. On the next crest was the village of Mondaino, its rounded bell-tower very red in the sun.
But don't think the countryside is a quiet idyll. The hens and guinea-fowl of Italy are as vocally expansive as its people and the ducks exploded in a cackling laughter when I dropped my olive-combing rake. There were shots from the local hunters than roam the woods. Half the countryside, meanwhile, was out bringing in the olive harvest and sometimes stanzas of Italian songs would drift across from neighbouring groves.
chris cummins
Yes, wwoofing can be an unforgettable experience, but your pleasures often have to be earned in sweat. The actual picking of olives was romantic and picturesque work, but I was left gasping for breath after lugging the filled crates back up the vertiginous slopes of the grove. In one grove the ground had been kept clean by digging pigs, which we had to tempt into the sties with acorn treats before we could start picking. But the second grove, too big to be fenced off for pigs, had been infested with canes and undergrowth. Before laying the nets, we had to clear the roots, brambles and shoots out of the overgrown grove with a sickle. Although it was November, I was soon so hot I had to work in a T-shirt.
But this was partly why I was here. There is an atavistic satisfaction about earning your keep with manual labour, particularly if you are usually desk-bound. We worked until the song of a blackbird announced the onset of evening, and then walked home through the woods in the dusk with aching muscles, ravenous hunger and a scythe slung over our shoulders. It was a feeling of completeness.
Tasting the Soil
An appetite is a useful thing to have when you are in Italy, of course. As well as by my interest in ecology, I had been first been drawn to wwoofing by the chance of deepening my relationship with food. In the farmhouse in Emilia-Romagna our meals at night were often made entirely from produce grown or reared on the small-holding - from the rich green salads (I did not know you could eat thistles) to the seasoning herbs, to the mushrooms found in the forest to the meat itself (vegetarians should choose their hosts carefully) .
Even the bread was home-baked by a fellow wwoofer in a charcoal oven by the open log fire. In the morning we spread it with pomegranate jam that we had made after squeezing the over-ripe fruit on the veranda until our hands were stained blood red. On a day when an eastern wind brought in rain from the nearby Adriatic I spent a morning in a shed helping make next year's wine.
chris cummins
It's the tasting of organically produced food rather than ideological argumentation that is likely to convince you of the benefits of gentle non-industrial farming methods. The greens from Suzie's gardens, the mixture of spinach and dandelion leaves, were melt-in-the mouth delicious. Small cuts of meat from the free-roaming chickens gave an incredible depth of flavour.
And it was the same with last year's olive-oil which we drizzled copiously over the Victoria's bread. Much of the olive oil you will buy in the supermarket has been harvested by metal machines that grab the tree and shake the olives down like a terrier shakes the neck of a rabbit. By hand-picking you reduce the amount of bruising and ensure maximum flavour - as well as showing a bit more respect to the land that feeds us.
Fruits of Labour
After two weeks on the farm, on a day when overnight snow had blanketed the high Apennines, we took this year's olives to the press. We hauled our crates into a Land Rover and drove over winding roads for a few kilometres to a village within sight of the cloud-banked Adriatic coastline. During the harvesting season the pressing room is running 24 hours a day and cap-wearing farmers, one looking like an unshaven Bill Murray, were loitering among stacks of crates by the weighing machine.
chris cummins
Several machines were chuntering away, each attended by an overall-wearing worker. One machine was stripping any leaves and twigs away, while another, which comprised of a pair of huge granite wheels at least 5 feet in diameter and stained an ecclesiastical purple by the olive skins, was grinding in hypnotic circles over a porridge-bed of olives. The whole room looked like the fantasy of a cartoon mad professor.
Finally there was a centrifuge to separate the oil from the water, and from that machine a steady stream of fresh oil was pouring into a shiny metal vat that we had brought with us. The oil was incredibly green and clear and smelled redolent of the crop fields of the disappeared summer. If you dipped your finger into the stream and tasted it straight out of the press it left a prickly peppery sensation in your throat. It was nearly 3a.m. when we collected the last drop of oil. By that time I was tired as a dog, but Phelan - a veteran of a score of harvests - was still skipping around in child-like enthusiasm as the fruit of our labours emerged.
chris cummins
The next day I set off back to Vienna with a bottle of the fresh oil in my bag, knowing I had had experienced much more than a "cheap holiday" since I had been picked up on the coast by a clapped out yellow Cinquecento a fortnight before, looking, like the misguided hero of the Blur song, for a respite from "the century's anxiety".
I'd got much more than that, even, if the sad truth be known, I had been mostly a pretty useless and clumsy agricultural helper. I'd lost a sickle in the undergrowth, bent a scythe and trod on bunches of olives and ruined them. I had to be shown everything and couldn't even light the open fire on my own.
chris cummins
But, just as it easy to believe you know a lot when you live in the cosmopolitan city with Auntie Google constantly on beck and call, it is refreshing - rejuvenating even - to realise that in fact you know remarkably little.
My hosts were unfailing patient and instructive. Their hospitality had a humbling effect, just like the grandiose countryside of Italy. You no longer want to be clever and be admired; you just wanted to be a small part of this wonderful place.