The hens look up at me from their nesting boxes. They seem slightly annoyed but unsurprised. A child runs up, pushes one of the chickens aside, and snatches two eggs. Around me, a half-dozen more children and adults collect eggs while a half-dozen others hand-feed dried mealworms to birds flocking around our ankles. I reach for an egg from an empty nest. There is something perfect about the way it fits warmly in the palm of my hand before I transfer it into a pretty wire basket provided to me by my hosts.
The egg harvest is a brief, carefully designed agritourism experience offering an experience of the labor rather than just having a bite of food. Snatching a few eggs and uprooting a few vegetables on the farm tour donˈt constitute a full dayˈs work, but it is also a useful reminder that food doesnˈt just magically appear on restaurant plates and grocery store shelves. Of course, visitors can take those eggs home or bring them to the on-farm restaurant, Clay, where a chef will use them to prepare breakfast.
A few centuries of industrialization, urbanization, and globalization have collected people into cities, but the attraction of the countryside has always remained. In the new urban-centered world, enterprising farmers have found plenty of opportunities to sell their rural lifestyle along with their crops. Italy promoted the modern model for combining agriculture and tourism in the wake of World War Ⅱ, when the national government encouraged rural populations to continue producing food rather than move to urban areas in search of more profitable jobs.
Agritourism acts as an umbrella term for a wide variety of activities that take place on farms, including farmstays, where guests sleep on-site. For varying investments of time, energy, and money, anyone can engage in our farming system, giving consumers a peek behind the farm-to-table world.
