“If you come into someone else’s vineyard, you can eat as many grapes as you like until you are full, only you are not allowed to put anything in a vessel.” That’s what it says in the Bible, in one of the books of Moses. And what’s in the Bible can’t be that wrong, can it? From an exegetical point of view, one can look at it like this: Anyone who steals to satisfy his hunger, i.e. who steals the mouth, should not be punished. Live and let live. But whoever steals in store to fill vessels or boxes, should meet the full severity of the law. Hand chopping off and so on.
Well, the Bible was written a long time ago, when there was no e-bike tourism, yes, no tourism at all. Therefore, the authors could not have suspected that at harvest time in the distant 21st century AD, mouth robbery on the Main and Lake Constance is so rampant that fruit growing associations sound the alarm. “Recently an entire vineyard was cleared,” complains about the state association of commercial fruit growing in Baden-Württemberg. Radler grabbed everything, for wine, apples and plums. Yes, it is mostly the cyclists, nowadays of course e-bikers, because wherever the fruit is gone, cycle paths lead past: At the Mainschleife between Kitzingen and Schweinfurt and along Lake Constance anyway.
Whether this is due to Corona, as one speculates at the fruit association in Baden-Württemberg, because it means more people are out there or whether the opportunity simply makes thieves, especially if you can quickly turn the bend with the electric motor afterwards, who knows . “Often this is a spontaneous impulse because an apple looks so delicious,” is the belief at Obst vom Bodensee-GmbH. But it also happens that people take bags of fruit with them.
And of course that can no longer pass as mouth robbery. Incidentally, the mitigating criminal offense “mouth robbery” was deleted from the German code of law as early as 1975, almost in biblical times. It’s been a theft like any other ever since.
However, hardly anyone is caught and punished. At most because there were still spray residues on the grapes and apples, which lead to an upset stomach.
And yet, we don’t want to judge, because whoever is without sin … And a lot of fruit rots unused because the owners are too lazy to harvest it. That is why there is a website called mundraub.org. There, fruit trees and bushes are listed that fruit thieves can legally use, and even thank them for.