Читать книгу In Winter's Kitchen - Beth Dooley - Страница 12
ОглавлениеEach of us has at least one “fairy tree” in our life, whether or not we remember. Mine was the apple tree in my childhood backyard; its U-shaped trunk was a wild place for me to hide with Daisy, our gangly yellow Lab. When the blossoms burst open we’d lounge in their fragrance, waiting for spirits to dust the flowers into ruby fruit. Later, I’d climb the branches to fill a pillowcase and Daisy licked the apples’ sticky juice from my hands.
Such a tree greeted me thirty-five years later at the western-Wisconsin farm campus, the Land School, of our sons’ Minneapolis Montessori school. Predating World War I, this tree reveals the place’s history with a simplicity that would elude even the most gifted storyteller. The sturdy, gnarled survivor was the first thing I saw when I came up the hard-packed dirt drive, its low branches open and welcoming, a ready embrace. It blossoms splendidly and produces lady apples, with yellowish skins, pretty red cheeks, and a faint scent of strawberries and rose. It’s the variety of apple tree that grows especially well in this region, needing the long cold winter to go dormant and enough snow to both protect it from overly harsh temperatures and, when the weather warms, melt to provide the tree with moisture. At harvest time, our young sons joyfully wriggled up into the branches for this distinctly sweet-tart, ping pong ball-sized fruit, then dropped with a soft thud and chased each other across the fields.
Picking apples is a quiet and absorbing task. You’re centered on a thin limb, stretching on tiptoe into the leaves, seeking balance. It seems the most prized apples are always the hardest to grasp. Cradled amidst the scents of ripe and rotting apples, you gain perspective on the earth’s daily spin from a sweet, safe perch. A good apple tastes of September sun, the warm, waning light; of its lineage; of the weather, the soil, and the way it was tended.
All this is to say that a good apple is the taste of balance—a range of natural acids and sugars, with notes so complex and different that they come on in waves of flavor with each bite. When cooked, a good apple may lose some of its subtlety—that hint of raspberries or rose or pepper or sage—while the essential character, the sharp and the sweet, becomes more intense. The variety of fruit and how and where it was grown informs the apple, just as the experiences of the eater have everything to do with how its taste is received. I doubt that I’d love apples so much if I’d never climbed into those trees as a child.
The old apple tree at the Land School is a regal reminder of the variety and diversity of the Upper Midwest’s small, independent orchards and fertile backyards. Up until the 1960s our region grew over fifteen thousand apple varieties, but today only about three thousand remain accessible to orchard keepers, gardeners, chefs, and home cooks.
Since the 1960s we’ve lost an estimated four out of five apple varieties unique to North America, many of which once grew in the Great Lakes region. Forty-five percent of the independently-owned nurseries that carried heirloom apple trees have gone out of business, unable to compete with the garden-and-lawn departments of big-box stores. Along with the orchards and trees went the supply of unique apples, replaced by cheaper and more readily available fruit from the large orchards on the West Coast. Gone, too, are many of the orchardists and their knowledge of trees and traditional practices, such as grafting cuttings of apple branches onto rootstock. Add to this climate change, which has reduced the number of winter chill hours critical to the health of our cold-hardy trees.
Yet despite all this, the future for apples is seeded with hope. Over the past twenty years, several organizations have pioneered efforts to preserve heritage trees as well as their related wisdom and lore, efforts inspired by the burgeoning interest in local foods. Gary Paul Nabhan—a founder of Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT), internationally celebrated nature writer, and food and farming activist—is a creative force bringing the “all-American apple” back to our plates. In 2010, RAFT hosted a conference spearheaded by the country’s fifteen leading apple authorities. The result, Forgotten Fruits Manual and Manifesto, provides a national strategy for saving and restoring heirloom apples. A status report on apple conservation and loss, it makes the case for returning heritage apples to home tables as food and cider. It’s having an impact.
Sales of heirloom apples have increased significantly over the past ten years, driven mainly by the remarkable revival of the cider industry. Cider production rose over 200 percent between 2005 and 2012, according to the Beer Institute. Some financial support for these efforts comes from Slow Food, with two hundred thousand members in the US, and the Ceres Trust. Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, whose mission is saving and sharing heirloom seeds, is a leader in this effort.
Seed Savers Exchange’s orchard manager and pomologist (apple expert), Dan Bussey, is on a mission to restore vanishing varieties by identifying their unique role in our culinary and ecological conversation. This “James Audubon of apples” is a vigorous man with piercing blue eyes, ruddy cheeks, and weathered, muscled arms that resemble the limbs of the trees he dearly loves. Over the past five years, he’s been cataloging over seventeen thousand different varieties for a seven-volume series, nearly three thousand pages titled The Illustrated History of Apples in North America. It describes the varieties known to have grown between the years 1623 and 2000.
Raised in the 1950s in rural Edgerton, Wisconsin, Bussey remembers his family’s trees and their generous branches where he hid after school to daydream and avoid homework. A prodigious apple picker, he made award-winning pies with his mother; he continues to do so today, using her recipe for a flaky crust. “I’ve learned which varieties really lend themselves to a good pie,” he told me. “You want some that stay firm and keep their slicing, and others that sauce down around it so you’ve got this wonderful filling of apple sauce with apple slices.”
When Bussey purchased his family’s land, he began restoring the orchard even before remodeling the old house. “By then, the orchard had been left to disrepair and I was set on reclaiming it,” he said. “I remembered my grandfather’s stories of his favorite apple, the T. E. Pippin, and was determined to find it. So I put an ad in the local paper offering a twenty-five-dollar reward to anyone willing to share seedlings or cuttings. The guy who replied said, on the phone, ‘I don’t want your money, I’m just happy to meet someone interested in these apples.’” As we strolled Seed Savers Exchange’s heritage apple orchard, Bussey told me, “That first early effort made me realize how deeply connected to this romantic fruit we all are. I’ve been connecting with apple lovers ever since.”
At Seed Savers Exchange, Bussey is charged with reclaiming the older varieties, by sleuthing leads in newspapers and on websites, and foraging through abandoned farms. “The network of apple enthusiasts devoted to this fruit is amazingly wide and passionate,” Bussey said. “I’ve been to big orchards, where the owner will put the most popular varieties out for sale—Honeycrisp, for example—but when that knowledgeable, long-time regular customer shows up, he’ll reach under the table and pull up his special heritage apples.”
All things apple seem to find Bussey, as well. “When I first began pressing cider on my own farm, people brought me apples from their backyards and shared their childhood memories; everyone seems to have a story. I believe these things come to me for a reason. It’s my destiny.”
The rolling Historic Orchard is a Grand Central Station of trees—the tall and straight rub shoulders with the gnarled, skinny, and squat—with over eleven hundred different varieties forming one of the largest collections in the country. “I love the names of some of the older apples,” Bussey said, pointing them out. “Sheepnose, Chenango Strawberry, Cow’s Snout. It’s part of what makes them so interesting and worth seeking out.” Their names only begin to suggest the wild variety of their flavors and strengths. “Every apple has a purpose,” Bussey continued. “Most of the older varieties were bred for baking, sauce, and cider. Storage was the major concern.” Many of the very old, wilder varieties have thick skins and a strong acid content to repel harmful critters, so make for poor eating out of hand.
Bussey reached into a big tree’s full, wide canopy, so heavy with fruit its branches were weighed low to the ground. “Geneva Crab,” he said, plucking off a perfectly round, bright-red apple and cupping it in his outreached palm. “This was developed by Miss Isabella Preston, in the 1930s, who worked for the Department of Agriculture in Canada. It’s descended from the Russian crab apple, called niedzwetskyana.” He spelled it out for me. “Came to South Dakota in the late 1800s with Mr. Niels Hansen, via Virginia . . . ” Bussey sliced the apple crosswise to reveal a white star surrounded by shockingly red flesh the color of the peel, and then offered me a slice. It was gently astringent, soft and memorable. “It’s not bad for eating,” he commented, rolling his piece up to the roof of his mouth like wine. “But it adds spectacular color to cider.”
Along with all the culinary benefits from these different varieties comes a healthier, more successful orchard. A diverse orchard is a secure orchard because different trees will respond differently to the pressures of weather, pests, and disease. If one type of apple tree is destroyed, others may still survive. “It’s critical to have a variety of apple trees. Diversity is the key to resilience; it’s also the key to flavor,” Bussey said.
The classes and workshops Bussey offers at Seed Savers Exchange and across the country sell out as soon as they’re posted. He teaches the time-tried skills of grafting, pruning, and identifying apple stock. And the economic prospects for heirloom apples are, in many ways, better than they’ve been in over a century, thanks to the recent resurgence of hard cider, apple wines, and spirits. The astonishing growth in artisanal cideries is helping drive demand for the wilder, more unusual fruit.
Cider apples tend to be small with a large skin-to-flesh ratio. “There’s really nothing new about hard cider,” Bussey said. Until the late 1800s, it was preferred over beer and folks drank it instead of water, which was often unsafe. Even kids drank cider because milk was reserved for making butter and cheese. Good hard cider relies on mostly tart apples, high in tannin, the throat-catching acid most often associated with wine. Cider apples can be so astringent that they are known as “spitters,” but when blended with juice pressed from sweet apples, they help make a nice balance. “And there’s cider vinegar and apple spirits,” Bussey continued. “I know we can distill a brandy as good as any French calvados.
“The challenge we have in trying to restore these apples is in helping people understand their different uses,” Bussey said. “They cover a gamut of flavors and textures and each variety has a purpose. Communicating this information is the hardest part of my work.”
RAFT, Seed Savers Exchange, and orchardists like Bussey are making it possible for researchers, commercial orchardists, and amateurs to preserve and share heritage seeds, learn how to graft and raise apple trees without chemicals, press cider for distilling and drinking fresh, and market their fruit, all funded by foundations, individuals, and grants with scant support from the US government.
“Particularly flavorful apples grow on trees that are deeply rooted in particular kinds of soil and in the rich traditions of particular landscapes,” Bussey said. Widely heralded apples such as Wolf River present a certain terroir, the taste of a place that is influenced by environmental factors, not just genetics alone. Flavor drives Bussey’s work and is becoming the key to reviving the industry.
When your favorite tree gives you too many apples, make sauce. Picking apples is mesmerizing and getting our sons to come down from the Land School’s tree to head home was a challenge. The trunkload of fruit filled the car with the sweet scents of damp grass and decay.
Back in our kitchen, our oldest son, Matt, the most cautious one, sliced the apples to reveal the star in the center and passed them to Tim, the youngest, who took this work seriously and removed the skins with a peeler. Then Kip, the least patient and most easily bored, pitched each half into the pot, a few feet from the counter. On the stove the sauce burbled its cinnamon comfort. They’d take turns stirring the pot until the sauce simmered into a fine, caramel mash.
One indigo afternoon, just as we returned from the orchard, my father called to say he’d landed in town and hoped it wouldn’t be an imposition to spend the night. Because he was an amateur pilot, it wasn’t odd for him to fly cross-country, earning “air miles,” but he never arrived unannounced. That night, he entered the kitchen subdued and weary. What had motivated the trip, and why was he so downtrodden? A spat with my mother? A business setback? Distracted by homework, dinner, baths, and applesauce, I didn’t ask.
But what I recall now is how, as he sat at the table, he relaxed in the glow of a Scotch in his hand, seemingly soothed by the boys, who scrambled up on his lap and hopped down to stir sauce. The kitchen filled with good smells while he shared stories of his war years on an escort ship in the Pacific and then of “bumming” through Alsace, France, and the orchards and the calvados of our exotic ancestral home.
The other day, our now twenty-five-year-old son, Kip, invited me over for dinner, and as I tripped over the bushel of apples in his doorway, it wasn’t hard to discern that he needed my help making applesauce and apple butter. As we peeled and sliced I realized that apples embody the endless qualities of motherhood: of risk, comfort, and promise. Cooking in my son’s kitchen, I was knocked back into the presence of my father and of our boys in the trees, and into the moments of reckless joy balancing on branches myself.
Some say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, but as our sons mature, I watch myself becoming the child of my children, just as my father sought parental comfort from me. As I witness my sons’ journeys into adulthood, I vicariously experience their delights and disappointments, a privilege and a curse. I seem to grow older and younger at once, as the child I was, the mother I used to be, and the grandmother I hope to become collapse together.
In the late 1950s, when small orchards and regional markets began to give way to huge West Coast growers and supermarket chains, the range of apple varieties shrank. By the 1970s the selection of apples in most supermarkets was limited to the McIntosh, Red Delicious, and Golden Delicious. Apple breeders were aiming to create durable, long-lasting, and attractive fruit that grew quickly and was easy to pick. But beautiful-looking apples often taste terrible. Price, not quality, was a determining factor as growers and grocers engaged in a race to see who could produce the largest yields and the lowest prices. In just a few decades, the commercial apple industry had turned this once delicious, portable, healthful snack into a bland product no one wanted. The ubiquitous, insipid Red Delicious gave all apples a bad rap.
In the early 1980s the sudden popularity of Granny Smith (England), Fuji (Japan), and Braeburn (New Zealand) apples proved that shoppers would pay more for a less-than-perfect apple if it tasted good. That’s when the apple-breeding program at the University of Minnesota began work on the Honeycrisp apple. Like Apple’s Macintosh computer, the U of M’s Honeycrisp upset the industry’s cart. Growing and selling apples would never be the same.
The U of M’s apple-breeding program is the nation’s oldest and largest. Funded by the Hatch Act of 1887, which provided research and development money to land-grant universities for the promotion of agriculture, by the early 1970s the program had released twenty-seven new varieties of apples—including Beacon, Haralson, and Prairie Spy—beloved by Minnesotans for their range of flavor and cooking qualities, but unknown in the rest of the country.
On its thirty-acre parcel of rolling hillside—about thirty miles west of Minneapolis, near the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum—the U of M’s research orchard is planted with over twenty thousand apple trees. To make apple crosses, pollen from one promising variety is swabbed onto the stamen of another, and then the flowers are bagged to keep out pollen from other trees.
The apple that grows on the branch will be true to the mother tree’s DNA, the seeds will contain equal parts of both parents’ genes, and every seed is distinct. The idea is to combine the best characteristics of both parents into trees that produce apples with a unique identity. Then the budding trees are grafted onto rootstock the next summer so that in about five years there will be new varieties that may become the next big apple. The successful results are then grown out for several years in a test orchard that replicates commercial conditions.
Dr. David Bedford, a U of M senior research fellow, credits the Honeycrisp’s success to its especially sweet flavor and extraordinarily crisp texture; its unusually big cells retain excess moisture and contribute to crunch. Now ranked America’s favorite, Honeycrisp appeals to those who previously claimed they didn’t like apples at all, preferring sweeter fruit brethren such as peaches or pears.
Honeycrisp, as with all university-bred apples, was a patented apple. Anyone who paid the U of M’s royalty fee of about a dollar per tree could plant a Honeycrisp. The problem is that since anyone could, everyone did. The huge orchards in Washington, Oregon, and Michigan grew great quantities of fruit and shipped it back into Minnesota, selling it at prices below what smaller Minnesota orchards could bear. This raised questions over whether the breeding program had strayed from its mission. Why wasn’t the U of M breeding more apples suited to this particular region with flavors unique to this particular place? Apples like those Haralsons?
The Honeycrisp earned the University of Minnesota more than $10 million in royalties before the patent expired in 2008. The Association of University Technology Managers named the Honeycrisp one of twenty-five innovations that changed the world, akin to Google and the V-chip.
Honeycrisp’s biggest grower in Minnesota is Pepin Heights, whose owner, Dennis Courtier, is the apple’s biggest advocate and defender. The Honeycrisp is a “persnickety apple,” and Courtier claims that because it is not an easy fruit to grow, large orchards, especially those on the West Coast, are producing substandard Honeycrisps that are hurting this variety’s image. Courtier contends that the Honeycrisp may become the next Red Delicious.
Bedford shared Courtier’s concerns about the fruit’s quality as well as the fate of the U of M’s research in volatile economic times. When the state cut $4 billion from its budget in 2008, the U of M’s apple-breeding program was slashed by two-thirds. So Bedford decided that new apples would be patented, licensed, and released as “managed varieties,” a concept introduced by Australia’s state-run apple-breeding program with its Pink Lady apples.
The U of M entered an arrangement with a consortium founded by Courtier—named the Next Big Thing—responsible for growing and marketing the U of M’s new fruit. Interested growers are required to apply to the consortium for permission to grow the new U of M varieties and, if accepted, follow strict guidelines for cultivating and selling them.
The SweeTango and Zestar!, released as “club apples,” are available only to those growers approved by the Next Big Thing for the wholesale market. Forty-five growers, mostly from Washington, Michigan, and Nova Scotia, were admitted to the “club” along with Pepin Heights, the only Minnesota grower. Club members pay royalties on both trees and fruit. Under the plan, Minnesota growers not approved by the Next Big Thing are restricted to planting three thousand trees (at first it was one thousand) and are permitted to sell apples at farmers’ markets, farm stands, and local grocery stores, but not via wholesalers.
Angered by exclusion from the “club,” a group of Minnesota and Wisconsin growers filed a lawsuit arguing that SweeTango and Zestar! were created with public funds just like the twenty-six varieties of apples before them, and that the University of Minnesota, a land-grant institution, was not fulfilling its mission of passing along agricultural advances to state farmers. The growers claimed the University of Minnesota had become their largest competitor and cited examples of Michigan-grown SweeTango apples, labeled “local” and placed alongside Minnesota fruit. The U of M countered that the “managed-varieties” arrangement ensures quality and maximizes revenue for ongoing research. It reasoned that it could license apples just like any other product created in a university lab.
Subsequently, regional growers created the Midwest Apple Improvement Association. Its mission is to support research and breeding of cold-hardy Minnesota apples and distribute them to a variety of wholesale and retail outlets. MAIA’s recently released EverCrisp apple tree is available to any grower willing to pay the association’s yearly dues.
Hoch Orchard, Minnesota’s largest organic apple grower, wasn’t party to the lawsuit against the Next Big Thing, but owner Harry Hoch is vocal about his objections to the “club arrangement.” “The university may inadvertently play a role in destroying the Minnesota wholesale apple industry because most of the SweeTango crop will not be grown here, but will be shipped thousands of miles back into our state. This cuts state growers from their own markets. We should be resourcing and growing more fruit that’s sold ‘near place.’”
Hoch Orchard is located near the Mississippi River Bluffs, not far from Pepin Heights. Harry is an intense, burly man with a full beard, and his wife and business partner, Jackie, is the kind of woman who can drive a tractor all day and then spend hours in the kitchen, chatting and rolling pie dough. Though their farm had been in the family since the early 1950s, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that Jackie, Harry, and their two daughters moved back on the land and began to work in the orchard full time. They left behind off-farm work in the city, Jackie in medical technology and Harry in the University of Minnesota’s Horticultural Research Center.
In our region, growing organic apples for market is extraordinarily difficult because of fungus and pests. Harry’s educational background and research work has proven instrumental in Hoch Orchards’ success. In fact, Harry wrote the book (literally) on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) for Upper Midwest orchard keepers. Thanks to his laborious IPM practices, Hoch Orchard uses no chemicals on its fruit. And he and Jackie are helping like-minded orchardists to do the same.
Hoch grows some Honeycrisp and SweeTango, but the rest of his orchard is devoted to over fifty different varieties, a mix of older and newer apples that naturally resist pests, disease, and fungus. Take the Duchess apple, planted by early pioneer farmers, which makes a fabulous pie, or the Viking, an older summer variety, especially sweet-tart and mild. The new generation of apples bred by the University of Minnesota all flourish without fungicides and pesticides: Pristine, a tangy, incredibly crisp dessert apple with a texture so delicate that it’s graded and polished by hand; William’s Pride, a resilient apple with a spicy edge. Hoch Orchard is proving that the newest apples, bred to grow organically, are economically viable, environmentally responsible, and delicious.
The orchard benefits from the Mississippi’s convection breezes, which rise to warm the fruit on cold nights and cool them on hot summer days. In August, the cycle of temperatures, coupled with the natural ethylene released from so much fruit, helps them sweeten and turn red. Hoch’s nine thousand trees, on more than twenty-five acres of land, flourish without dangerous pesticides, fertilizers, or fungicides. Hoch ripens the apples naturally, without plant growth regulators or ripening agents. The apples are cleaned and packed on the farm, without application of wax, food-grade shellac, or any post-harvest pesticides. Eagles soar above the trees, carried on the big river’s winds. Hoch, thousands of miles away from the West Coast’s commercial orchards, has redefined this iconic fruit.
West Coast growers in Oregon and California manage up to one thousand trees per acre on as many as thirty thousand acres of land. This provides efficiencies in pruning, spraying, and harvesting, but it creates huge challenges as well. As with humans, diseases, pests, and fungus spread rapidly among close neighbors, especially when they are genetically identical. As a result, farmers rely on fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides that employ such toxins as AZM and Phosmet. The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a public health advocacy group, recently named conventional, commercially grown apples as one of the most contaminated fruits grown in the US. To reduce the use of these toxins, plant geneticists created GMO Red Delicious apples using transgenic technologies to code in genetic resistance to diseases, fungus, and pests. The first field trials of GMO apples were conducted in 1992 in the US, Great Britain, and New Zealand. But there’s no proof that these trees are any better than those nature has provided, and the encoded resistance is beginning to break down so that even more chemicals must be applied to resist disease and blight.
Last year, the Next Big Thing growers produced more than half a billion SweeTango apples. Recently, the NBT joined with twelve fruit marketers from eleven countries and five continents in a global consortium called IFORED. Currently SweeTango apples are sold in all fifty states and in Canada, and perhaps soon they’ll be grown and sold throughout the world.
What do we forfeit when we rely on other regions to provide us with food we could grow ourselves? We gain reliability and consistent supply, of course, but we also lose the flavor of a diverse life, and its savor—the knowledge that this flavor is only a season long, or only found with some searching. By growing a diverse food system in the Heartland, organizations like Seed Savers Exchange and small, independent orchards like Hoch are ensuring that there is yet magic in the world to attract our children to the outdoors and the richness that can imbue their lives with the memories of a vibrant past.
The apples we find at the Land School are a product of its isolated history. The school is in a remote area half an hour from supermarkets and shopping malls. The neighboring farmers who remain here eke out a meager livelihood raising dairy cattle, goats, sheep, and CSA vegetables, as well as some hay, corn, and soy. This farm’s isolation has allowed my old tree to thrive through four generations of families who picked the fruit, made sauce and pies, and stored the apples, wrapped in newspaper, in baskets in the root cellar.
The school’s apples are unique to this farm, to its soil, rain, and sun. I’ve never eaten anything like them. Will our kids recall their flavor? It’s the taste of fall family work weekends with wheelbarrow races, basketball in the hayloft, flashlight tag; of the day our big sloppy black Lab was ambushed by the bossy rooster. It’s the hours our youngest son, Tim, spent on the creek’s shore building “troll” houses with sticks and leaves; it’s the scent of the campfire’s wood smoke as parents and kids talked late into the night after dinner; and it’s that sticky, apple-rich scent that filled the packing shed when we sorted apples into the CSA boxes for the weekly share.
The new varieties from the U of M, SweeTango, Zestar!, and their forerunner, Honeycrisp, were not created in nature and are not the happy accident of wind or bees. Yet they’ve become the industry standard, exploding with juices and a crackling crunch, bloated and thin-skinned. That first snap of sweetness quickly turns cloying because they are a one-note fruit—big, and often hard to finish. The Land School’s neighboring farmer Dale told me that even his pigs seem to have tired of them. “If I put Honeycrisp or SweeTango in their trough they’ll tip it over. They’ve just gotten used to more complex flavors,” he jokes. “They’re interested at first, but then, you know, I can tell that they’re looking for something else.”
That saying—“The apple never falls far from the tree”—is often used as a catchall for the inevitable strengths and weaknesses that the older generation passes on to the young. Among farmers, the wisdom being passed can only be seen as a positive. The work being done to preserve heirloom apples is making it possible for those eager to learn the old ways to carry them forward, melding modern technologies and ecological wisdom. Our nineteenth century’s apple diversity reflected different purposes and different needs, but reflected an appetite for differences. When I taste a good apple, I taste the biodiversity it represents. If we succumb to a world of the generic apple, we are in danger of our taste buds becoming generic as well. Cultivating ourselves is the first step toward diversifying our orchards.
Dan Bussey’s orchard grows apples in fascinating shapes, colors, and flavors that can delight and nurture us all. As such, the apple is a “democratic” fruit, as varied and interesting and diverse as our country itself. An affordable luxury, apples are within the means of every person. Their enjoyment requires nothing more than our attention to the variety of trees and the stories they tell. Simple and straightforward, this fruit has a special meaning among people who know what they are eating. In many ways, the apple may lead us to a greater understanding and appreciation of our food and our land, in the same way the original apple, in the Garden of Eden, provided another kind of wisdom that carried us forward.
