Extending the olive branch
November 1, 2013
As Eleanor Roosevelt famously said, “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” For us, that “thing” was getting people to pay us to pick our olives. They said it couldn’t be done. They unkindly said, “What you’re doing is a scam.” But “they” were Provence natives who had never worked in a drab, featureless building or gone months without seeing a bird that wasn’t a pigeon. They didn’t ride a loud, cold train to work with the other corporate drones, who wished they were anywhere else but there.
If you had stopped by the Chicago office on the 50th floor where I worked ten years ago, and told me that for just €50 I could spend the day picking olives on an organic farm in Provence, plus enjoy a traditional French countryside lunch of beefdaube, saffron potatoes au gratin, ratatouille, cheese and dessert plus all the wine I cared to drink … well, I would have signed up twice. And probably kissed you, to boot.
Photo: Walter Pfeiffer
And as it turned out, the opportunity was indeed attractive to other city dwellers. A businessman from Ireland, a lawyer from LA and even a recent graduate of Le Cordon Bleu Culinary School in California – all among the folks who willingly paid to pick olives and have lunch with us. We picked 75 kilos of olives that day. And, as is often the case with our tours, people who came to us as paying clients left as friends. For that alone, we consider the endeavour a success.
November 15, 2013
People often ask how we got started hunting truffles. It began with our British neighbours, who heard that the former owners of their house used to find truffles on the property. They asked my husband, Johann, if he knew of any truffle hunters who could come to the house to see if the story was true. And as it happened, one of his childhood friends, Jean-Marc, is a third-generation truffle hunter with two trained dogs.