Country excursion

I took a few German friends to my hometown today for an rural Southwestern experience. We went to the peach festival in Willcox at Apple Annie's Orchard. It wasn't much of a festival, really.

But we picked some peaches--some of the few good ones leftover from the freeze that destroyed 90 percent of the orchard's harvest.

And we bought some pluots they had shipped in from California.

After pining over the apple bread, cheese, pie, cider and fudge in the orchard's country grocery shop and sweating profusely in the buggy, muggy orchard, we decided to have apple smoked burgers at the orchard's Burger Barn.

The price turned me off immediately: $8.99 for a burger, cowboy beans, chips, a drink and pie a la mode. It's just not worth that much to me--the burgers aren't even that big.

But the Germans wanted to give it a try, so we did.

Me being the vegetarian, I had a veggie burger--something they haven't had in previous years.

Although it was thin and very wide, the burger was good. It tasted like it was locally made--I hope it was.

I wasn't able to eat the cowboy beans, since there was pork in them. I got Cheetos instead of chips. And the drink selection wasn't that fantastic--sugary sodas or tiny water bottles. Whatever happened to Apple Annie's fresh apple cider? It was one of the orchard's trademarks in my youth--we went there explicitly to get apple bread and apple cider. And now? No cider.

The pie, of course, was tasty. I got the apple raspberry. Steffi got peach raspberry, though there wasn't much raspberry in it, and Ingo got pecan. Everyone enjoyed their pie, and the huge slab of ice cream a la mode (except Steffi, who forewent the a la mode).

Although there wasn't too much to complain about, I still feel like $8.99 (or $9.94 including tax) is a bit of a ripoff.

I guess that's what you get for eating local foods, though. Not only was the meal expensive, but the produce on the farm is always very expensive.

Which brings us to today's big question: why is locally farmed produce always more expensive than the stuff at the grocery store? It doesn't make any sense, and it defies logic. If you can explain it, be my guest.