Crush Those Apples

Last Saturday, I went over to some friends’ place for an “apple cider making party.” They had rented a manual apple press and collected fruit from the two trees in their yard. Since the partygoers included a bunch of kids, aged a few months old to 11, there was some chaos involved. And hours of play. And a lot of laughter. Amid it all, the apples did get chopped up and the press did get cranked — better by some than others. All of us got to take home a bottle of delicious apple juice. 

The material result of all that labor is long gone — my family chugged down our share of the juice within a day, no waiting around for it to ferment into cider — but I’ve been mulling over the apple press itself, and food, and technology, and the pace of our lives ever since. 

As the Journal team rushes through long workdays to wrap up our special fall issue on cities and urban environments, I’ve been thinking specially about what Tom Smith, a researcher of post-capitalist economic alternatives at Masaryk University, Czech Republic, wrote in another Journal special issue. “Technologies,” he wrote, “are intimately connected to time — they compress it, mold it, crumple it.” In other words, technological advances allow us to complete tasks faster. But in so many ways, they also make us do more, produce more, consume more. Which is why Smith makes the case for “slow ecotechnics” — like that hand-cranked apple press, and bicycles, and agroecology — which, he says, convey "a material politics of uncertainty, humility, and regeneration, attuned to gradualism and local ecological systems.”
 
I’m not quite sure if and how we will transition to using such tech more widely in this age of Great Acceleration, but given the rise of discussions around economic “degrowth” and four-day work weeks, it appears that the general idea of slowing down is gaining traction in mainstream thinking. That’s a good sign.

In that spirit, I’m looking out my home office window at all the apples scattered on the ground in my front yard, and wondering — should I too rent an apple press and compress fruit instead of time this weekend?
 

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