The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

by Michael Pollan

A far more brutal winnowing of the apple’s prodigious variability took place around the turn of the century. That’s when the temperance movement drove cider underground and cut down the American cider orchard, that wildness preserve and riotous breeding ground of apple originality. Americans began to eat rather than drink their apples, thanks in part to a PR slogan: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Around the same time, refrigeration made possible a national market for apples, and the industry got together and decided it would be wise to simplify that market by planting and promoting only a small handful of brand-name varieties. That market had no use for the immense variety of qualities the nineteenth-century apple embodied. Now just two of these qualities counted: beauty and sweetness. Beauty in an apple meant a uniform redness, by and large; russeting now doomed even the tastiest apple.