blueberry equivalents

Today felt like *summer - warm, slow, and sleepy. The main activity of the day was to pick blueberries off the blueberry bushes. I definitely ate a bunch of the less ripe ones that I'd accidentally picked, which may be contributing to some kind of disenchanted relationship to the blueberries I once thought precious and rare. A good thing and/or a bad thing.

In total, we picked $720 worth of blueberries this afternoon, 12 flats or 144 baskets at $5 per basket. They all fit into one vermont cart, in my mind, the worth of one month's rent for a single room in a Southside Berkeley apartment in blueberry equivalents.

These blueberries are precious, though. They're actually locked in an enclosed, netted structure that protects them from human and avian theft. Today's blueberry harvest alone took 18 man-hours of amateur picking. Each basket took about 7.5 minutes to pick, not to mention all the additional hours and inputs invested into them prior to harvest. Like every other crop I'm developing a closer relationship to, I'm finding that good food in all aspects is a labor of love and their value, multidimensional. Like organic blueberries: enchanting, sweet, healthy, expensive, laborious, lovely, blue.

*Officially, though, the first day of summer is in exactly one week, June 21st, 2011.