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thousands of apple cultivars are known around the world, barely twenty varieties are widely available in local supermarkets.
The apple did such a convincing job of making itself at home in America that many Americans wrongly assume the fruit is a native.
Enmeshed in the folklore and history of nations around the globe, apples have been associated with love, beauty, luck, health, comfort, pleasure, wisdom, temptation, sensuality and fertility
As Vavilov predicted, it’s now believed that all of the apples known today are direct descendents of the wild apples that evolved in Kazakhstan.
Humans passing through the mountains of central Asia helped apples spread east and west. Travellers on the Silk Road, which passed through some of the richest apple forests, packed some of the biggest and tastiest fruits in their saddlebags to snack on as they made their journeys. Animals, too,
Creating apples of the same variety is not easy. Like humans, apples create offspring that differ, sometimes dramatically, from their parents. Every seed in an apple contains the genetic material for a completely new kind of apple. Each generation looks and tastes different.
the Romans cultivated 23 different varieties of apples. Presenting someone with apples you had grown yourself was considered a high compliment in Rome,
Latin expression ova ad malum, ‘from the egg to the apple’,
Over thousands of years, apples have followed the westward course of empire, travelling from Central Asia to the ancient world to Europe, and then on to the Americas with the explorers and colonists.
At some time, apples have symbolized nearly every kind of fruit. Whenever a new fruit or vegetable was discovered that was round and sized somewhere between a cherry and a pumpkin, it was often called an ‘apple’ until given a name of its own. The list of foods called ‘apple’ at some point includes everything from avocados and cashews to aubergines (eggplants) and pine nuts
Early Christian scholars often took the forbidden fruit to be an apple, possibly because the Latin word malum means both ‘apple’ and ‘evil’. It also probably helped that apples were more popular in Europe, where most of these Christians lived, than in the Middle East.
apples often signal love and immortality, as well as the simple gift of friendship.
Apples also symbolized peace in China and were considered especially good luck if they happened to be red.
At least 47 British places include a reference to apples in their names, a clear indication of the fruit’s importance to the Celts and later the Anglo-Saxons.
Apples became the first fruit of America. Many colonists felt that settling in the New World held the prospect of universal redemption, a second chance for humans. Planting an apple orchard was an essential part of that vision of a new Jerusalem, nearly as important as putting a roof over one’s head.
Chapman planted only seeds, no grafts, because he wanted to reveal the vast multiplicity of apple types contained within each apple. Hundreds of new apples never seen anywhere in the world grew across the American frontier.
the pressed juice of apples produced an alcoholic beverage about half the strength of wine.
for the English, cider made the most efficient use of resources as well as providing refreshment and a dash of patriotism.
The Industrial Revolution changed everything: as more people moved from the farm to the city, the quality of cider dropped, although demand remained strong.
Apples can be divided into three broad categories that roughly correspond to taste and use: dessert, cooking and cider apples. Dessert apples are usually eaten fresh out of hand and are sweet in flavour but balanced with acidity. Cooking apples often taste more tart because they have more malic acid (the active ingredient in most sour or tart foods) or because they have less sugar. They also tend to cook down into a softy, pulpy mass rather than retaining their shape like dessert apples.
While not a substitute for a toothbrush, apples are still considered a good teeth-cleansing food today.
At the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, J. T. Stinson, a Missouri fruit specialist, coined the famous adage ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’, an association that apples have benefited from ever since.
Today, when apples are universally thought of as healthy, it can be hard to believe that apples once aroused suspicion. Apples contain fibre, vitamins and flavonoids that play an important role in preventing many types of disease and in promoting good digestion. That apples are available nearly year-round also makes them an easy, healthy choice.
The modern apple industry has grown so large that only twenty or so apples have gained a place at the global table – and nearly all of them are varieties first developed in North America.
Sea transport made it possible for the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and eventually South Africa to send barrel after barrel of fresh apples abroad in the nineteenth century. Whereas before apples for export had traditionally been dried or made into cider, improved ships plus new, hardier apple varieties led to a huge increase in the transport of fresh fruit.
Apple-breeding flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as growers rushed to find the perfect apple for an expanding global marketplace.
As the agricultural market grew larger and more global, the small market gardeners with their diverse orchards could not compete. Many local, favourite apples simply ceased to be grown because their irregular crops, tendency to bruising or disease or other shortcomings failed to meet the stringent requirements of the new global marketplace.
Growers competed fiercely to produce the most attractive rather than the most delicious fruit
Apple varieties developed in North America were planted in orchards around the world and now account for more than 80 per cent of the world’s apple market.
The Pink Lady apple, for example, is a cross of the Golden Delicious and the Lady Williams. The Jonagold is a cross of the Jonathan and Golden Delicious, and the Gala is a cross of Kidd’s Orange Red and the Golden Delicious.
The most widely eaten apple variety in the world is the Golden Delicious, accounting for more than 65 per cent of the world market.
Golden Delicious was extensively planted around the us by the 1920s, and became the archetype of the modern commercial apple.
The world’s most common green apple, the Granny Smith, originated in what is now the Sydney suburb of Eastwood, Australia.
The Granny Smith apple is today extensively grown in the southern hemisphere. It’s particularly popular for export due to its waxy skin and robust, crisp flavour.
Pesticides and insecticides have also changed the apple industry. Chemicals were not widely used in apple-growing in North America until the late nineteenth century because many of the pests that would eventually become troublesome had not yet made the trip to the New World.
As living, breathing organisms, apples begin to deteriorate as soon as they are picked. An apple eaten today won’t taste or smell quite the same as it would have done the day before, a liability for growers. Fully grown apples
Roadside stands, farmers’ markets and orchards are some of the best places to find fresh, locally grown apples.
Even a locally grown MacIntosh or Red Delicious, apples often found in supermarkets, can taste remarkably different when eaten fresh from the tree.
Don’t trust your eyes, because looks can be deceiving in the apple world. Some apples that appear humble, mottled and even misshapen can taste far better than their shiny, uniformly coloured cousins.
An apple’s colour has always tempted eaters, a clever trick apples have used for centuries to entice animals and humans to indulge and, in the process, help to spread its seeds.
