Encounters with the apple

by Rae (26, resident of Albuquerque, NM)

Find here three brief anecdotes in response to a prompt to share “any memorable experience with apples in one’s life.” Respondents are loved ones: Nino (34, resident of western Massachusetts), Scout (28, resident of NYC), and Dawood (30, roaming resident of all over).

The mundane and the magical

These conversations feature takes on the apple that range from the quotidienne to the enlightening. Sometimes discussed in utilitarian terms, sometimes revered as a source of awe, the apple evoked thorough reply from every speaker. No conversation was confined to the gustatory realm. Yet, taste and texture remained a significant factor in my friends’ articulation of their experience with apples…woe is the humble, mealy apple. All hail the crisp.

Nino - the fruit of knowledge

Scout - sliced just right

Dawood - feral finding

A snack, a spectacle, a symbol?

The apple is at once a fruit of great simplicity and complication. Little red globe, fruit of Malus domestica, meat of pie, source of poison (both literal and literary), symbol of the pure and the pastoral, and poster-child of modern horticulture. These conversations speak to the roles apples can play in our lives and how these roles are shaped by both individual lived experience and a culturally-constructed consciousness. I myself fell in love with apples while living in The Big Apple, and they’ve since captivated my amusement as a good and a symbol that is simultaneously omnipresent and entirely taken for granted.

At the industrial level, apples are a ubiquitous commodity that nations, subregions, and states claim as identity. Nino speaks to the ways in which his move to Pennsylvania was immediately impressed by the state’s booming apple agribusiness, that visiting an orchard is “always something one can do” there. He recalls spending much of his time upon first arriving doing just that, apple-bobbing, and developing a habit of walking with apples in-hand. The latter became an exercise of personal identity — an individual taste shaped by its cultural context: a state that peddles apples as a sort of ideology and pride. The collision of Pennsylvania apple-mania and Nino’s chronic compulsion to stroll birthed an idyllic personal praxis of sorts, one Nino describes as fostering clarity and even epiphany — that he consequently “did some of his best thinking in West Philadelphia.”

I am interested in the influence of America’s adoption of the apple as a signifier of wisdom, so I ask Nino whether he believes there’s any part of his attachment to apples and deep thinking that is informed by apples’ association with education and intelligentsia. He replies with a biblical reference to the tree of knowledge and with a concession of how deeply ingrained — subconscious, even— that association between forbidden fruit and enlightenment may be. Perhaps Nino’s subconscious codes this daily act of biting into an apple en route to revelation as a lapsarian habit, and as a rejection of his “oppressively catholic” upbringing. No doubt, the habit brings him closer to personal peace — Philly his Eden and the apple not as sin, but as “that-which-invites-patience.”

Certainly, food and faith are often intertwined. Nino wasn’t the only one whose experience with apples harkened to religious upbringing. Scout shares that their most recent encounter with apples was in preparation for a dish at Rosh Hashana - a Jewish celebration. The Talmud, too, has no shortage of references to apple trees as bearers not of forbidden knowledge, but of sweetness and blessing. The praise Scout received for the dish inspired a sense of pride and desire to replicate their contribution, such that they “now want to be the one who brings the apples every year” — an illustration of the ways that positive social encounters with food can reinforce our sense of belonging and sense of self, even to the extent of seeking to develop and/or maintain a skillset within food preparation to relive the community connection and validation it enabled.

Scout also describes the “lore” of apple varieties and the pursuit for the best or rarest varieties. There is an interesting contrast between the coexistence of this apple connoisseurship and what often seems to be a general disregard for apples as anything which could inspire desire. As Scout recounts feeling as a child, there’s sometimes this collective sense that “it’s not a real snack!” It is the boring discard in children’s lunch box. One wonders why, or how this disregard for apples as uninteresting changes in some Americans over time. The answer may lie in Scout’s description of Cosmic Crisp: “it looks like a galaxy!” Or in Nino’s romanticization of “enormous” apples

The apple industry has grown itself via the spectacle and the technology that enables the genetic grooming of apples into bright, glossy snacks that are reliably sweet and reliably crisp. Every person interviewed gave “crisp” as the first quality that they seek in an apple. Scout explicitly decried mealy apples and lauded the “deep red” of Cosmic Crisp apples. The fashioning of apples into consistent, frankly plastic-looking objects aligns with a broader history of agricultural industrialization and sanitizing of “natural” foods — an improvement upon nature. As a culture, we are so accustomed to these designer apples that an encounter with a wild apple may be a foreign experience.

So shares Dawood as he describes what was his (and my) first meeting of a wild apple tree in Vermont. Dawood, like Scout, tells a trajectory of relative indifference to apples as a child followed by a deepened appreciation for varieties like Honeycrisp as an adult. But he concedes that Honeycrisp apples are still to him, just “things [you] see in the grocery store.” They are another food that has been abstracted by processes of both globalization and industrialization. Our spontaneous meeting with wild apple trees felt like both a fairytale and a reality-check. Dawood describes the experience as moving and “feral.” It is as if we are so far removed from the origins of these fruits that appear in our everyday diets and iconography that an experience which should be so obvious and natural felt like a surreal discovery of another realm. And of course, the contrast between the texture and flavor of these apples and that which we’re accustomed to from the supermarket is a reminder of the timeliness of our foods — that food evolves with us. Biting into an apple today cannot transport one seamlessly back in time. Not only have we lost many hundreds of apple varieties to market homogenization — that pursuit of the big and the crisp! — but even revivals of heirloom cultivars will never mimic perfectly the tastes of the past.

Food for thought, religious tradition, a shiny red spectacle, an invitation to wilderness — what isn’t the apple? It is difficult to begin to patch together a coherent narrative of the apple, much like it is impossible to define any food and what it means to those who enjoy it.