Pumpkins, On My Honor

Driving home from the cheese market in Huttwil, I had my favorite singer Sandra McCracken turned up loud and my eyes peeled for children, cats, and other animals that are likely to jump out onto tiny country roads without warning. Suddenly I hit the brakes, but it wasn't because something leaped out onto the road. 



Flashes of of orange and green had caught my eye. Pumpkins! What from the side looked like just another old barn showed itself to be a rustic and colorful farm stand, one of the nicest I've ever seen.



Farm stands are nothing unusual in Switzerland - you can hardly go for a drive without passing homemade signs listing the seasonal produce available directly for sale.  Usually it's a table with a few bags of apples and pears and pumpkins, or a refrigerator at the end of a driveway containing eggs and sausages and milk, or occasionally a covered wagon by the side of the road with bushels of vegetables.



The thing I absolutely love about these stands, apart from the satisfaction of buying quality farm-fresh ingredients, is that they all run on the honor system.  A padlocked iron box in the vicinity, labeled "Kasse" and usually taped up with a price list, has a slot for your coins and bills - but there's not a human in sight.  Choose your items, add up the total, drop your money in and drive away.  Nobody will check. Nobody will see.  It's absolutely up to you to do the right thing. Many people, as above, will peel the price sticker off more expensive items and stick it to the box as a tally for the farmer so he has an approximate idea of how much should be inside.

The system works for more than just pumpkins.  Anita has written about how flower-picking works the same way, as does berry-picking.  Train tickets on short stretches are on your honor, and even big chain supermarkets like Coop have caught on with their Passabene system.  From what I've read, there is the occasional theft, but it's not enough to stop vendors from using the system. It's so culturally different from the "everyone is just trying to rip me off" mentality of many other countries, and makes me proud to be Swiss.

Back to the farm stand! A lot of care had obviously been put into setting it up, with decorated wagon wheels, pumpkins carefully sorted and arranged into baskets and troughs, and strings of lights and dried corn.







I had a lot of fun inspecting all the different varieties and practicing my photography, and of course I didn't leave empty handed. In my market bag already brimming with cheese, I somehow still found room for some cute little pumpkins for the dining room table and a couple liters of fresh cider made from Grafensteiner apples.



What experiences have you had with the honor system, both good and bad?