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After considered one of my common 4.30am begins final week, I caught a snippet of a characteristic on Farming Right now about fruit-picking robots. Listening to in regards to the multi-billion-pound mechanical arms and 3D sensors of this new machine, I used to be full of one thing like disappointment. Not simply due to what this says about our self-inflicted workforce scarcity (sigh) attributable to political foot-shooting and the undervaluing of handbook work. However as a result of fruit selecting may very well be so completely different.I as soon as spent an attention-grabbing few nights in New Zealand, sharing a motel with about 50 apple-pickers from Vanuatu, Samoa and past. We listened to reggae, washed our pants within the sink and smoked cigarettes as they informed me about scaling down child apples, and selecting pineapples and peaches. It was a tough life, completely little question. A daybreak begin in a cramped rented room, sleeping underneath polyester floral eiderdowns with nothing however a kettle and a juddering bathe, earlier than being pushed to completely different farms shouldn’t be simple work. And, after all, these setups are rife with corruption and exploitation and trendy slavery. However are robots our solely different?My mum talks, in all probability with a specific amount of nostalgia, about seeing London households flip up in Kent within the Fifties to select fruit on the farms as a summer time vacation. After nursery, I usually cycle my son half an hour out of city to a farm the place you possibly can decide strawberriesand raspberries and rip artichokes off big inexperienced thistles. He loves it. He’s animated and delighted by the odor of crops, the texture of soil, the artwork of guessing which is essentially the most scrumptious. In fact, that is to farming what The Wheels on the Bus is to move planning throughout the M60, but it surely nonetheless feels necessary that he not less than sees the place fruit comes from. I need him to understand the hassle and vitality and sources that go into producing it; the miracle of pollination; the tenacity of climate and the chance of farming.I concern that robotic fruit-pickers is perhaps simply one other step that takes us away from understanding how our meals is grown: the swarms of plastic packaging, the brightly lit grocery store aisles, the insulated doorstep deliveries and plucked, minimize, washed and sliced components.I fear that we’re making meals – the entire act of consuming – a hands-off expertise.
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