The Apple: An American Icon
Americans have an insatiable appetite for the apple, a tasty immigrant fruit that's now an iconic symbol of patriotism and the American pioneering spirit. Centuries of hard work in the orchard have made the apple a favorite fruit, and each year, on average, each American consumes 16 pounds of fresh apples and 22.3 pounds of apple juice and cider.
Apples are a central figure in our collective psyche, history, culture, folkways, and the vernacular so is it any wonder this iconic fruit an essential part of our diet? What's ironic is the inedible crabapple is the only apple native to North America, which begs the question, how did apples get here and why are we so fiercely devoted to them?
Plant a Fruit Tree and Save a New Nation
Our fondness for Malus domestica goes back five centuries and can be traced to the English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. When Captain John Smith arrived with the first European settlers, they brought with them seeds and cuttings from England's best fruit trees in anticipation of a meager start in a wild and untamed new world. The settlers quickly discovered the only wild indigenous fruits available were crabapples, pawpaws, cherries, mulberries, and persimmons, but fortunately, the soil was fertile and many of the English apple trees survived or thrived.
Within a few short years the transplants successfully bore fruit and American settlers became adept orchardists with a wide variety of apple trees for eating, cooking, and making cider. In 1629, John Smith noted that peaches, apples, apricots, and figs "prosper[ed] exceedingly" in the colony, and by 1642 fruit trees from Europe were so successful William Berkley, the first governor of Virginia, had a thriving orchard of more than 1,500 trees at his Green Spring estate. What history teachers don't teach you in school is that most of the apple trees, and many of the peach and pear trees, were planted solely for the production of cider, perry, and brandy.
From Seed to Orchard
As the colonies grew and other settlers arrived from Holland, England, and Germany, they planted apple seeds up and down the East Coast and every citizen with access to a plot of land, garden, or patch of green planted apple trees for their own use or sold the excess at market. However, they did so with varying degrees of success thanks to harsh North American winters, humidity, and native pests.
In addition, Johnny Appleseed, aka John Chapman, myths to the contrary successful apple cultivation from seed is never a sure thing and finding the right variety for each region involves much more than dropping seeds into the ground and waiting for a tree to sprout. That's because most apple varieties grown from seed produce inferior fruit, or what are called "spitters," and as a result, sheer volume and luck helped establish many of the heirloom and antique varieties still popular today.
While apple pie may be an American classic, apples trees were not, in general, planted for apples that could used for baking, cooking, and eating , the primary motivation for planting apple trees was to make the colonists most popular drink—hard cider. The cuttings the British and Dutch brought with them were from cider varieties used for centuries in Europe and since drinking water wasn't always safe, everyone, young and old drank hard cider with every meal.
The Golden Age of Apples
By the 1800s, grafting methods and techniques had improved immensely and orchardists, including Johnny Appleseed, preferred this method for cultivating apples because "Apples are a deciduous tree that is a member of the rose family, and like roses, the best way to grow and propagate them is by grafting the chosen apple variety onto root stock." This improvement led to what pomologists call the Golden Age of Apples. It began during Thomas Jefferson's era and ended in the 20th century and provided American consumers access to more than 17,000 varieties of apples (which were definitively cataloged in 1905 when the United States Department of Agriculture published a bulletin by staff pomologist W.H. Ragan entitled Nomenclature of the Apple: A Catalog of the Known Varieties Referred to in American Publications from 1804 to 1904) that spanned the seasons, offered a rainbow of colors and textures, included a vast array of flavors and aromas, and included apple varieties that could be used to cook, eat raw, store, feed livestock, and make exceptional cider.
Johnny Appleseed: The Man Behind the Myth
One man who played a large part in spreading this biological diversity was John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed. Born in Massachusetts to a Revolutionary War minuteman in either 1774 or 1775, Johnny Appleseed spent 40 years traveling across thousands of miles of wild frontier in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. His mission: to help westward expansion by planting apple seeds along the routes favored by pioneers settling in the Midwest and West, spread the gospel of the New Church, and expand his own landholdings, for profit.
This profit motive, and the desire to acquire land, is what led him to establish orchards and nurseries that provided cider apple seeds and saplings he could sell to newly arriving homesteaders. He also used the sale of orchards and land to accumulate wealth that was often used to buy more land or recoup losses due to the crash of the economy in 1837. His landholdings were so extensive that by the time he died in 1845 he owned more than 1,200 acres of orchards and nurseries.
Modern Apples for a Modern Society
With the dawn of the twentieth century, our population began to shift from an agrarian, rural economy to a more urban, industrial one. Soon small family orchards gave way and the introduction of refrigeration, fast rail transportation, and westward expansion led to mass cultivation led by large agricultural businesses. As farms and orchards grew, there was a corresponding decline in the quality and variety of apples grown and sold in supermarkets due to the perception that modern food production required scientific, mechanized, more standardized approaches to agriculture.
Rather than grow the best tasting apples, the focus was on a perfect, unblemished apple that had high yields and good profit margins and could withstand the rigors of modern shipping, storage, and long shelf life requirements. The desire to grow apples that appealed to more people resulted in corresponding reductions in the varieties of apples being grown and thus the spectrum of flavors and colors available to buy.
Apple Trends
Today, about 100 apple varieties are commercially cultivated and while the pendulum has not completely swung back the other direction to be in the thousands, consumers are demanding better apples and innovative, dedicated orchardists are ready to give them what they want. This demand is fueling the drift away from Red Delicious, Granny Smith, and Yellow Delicious, which are losing their dominance on grocery store shelves and are being replaced by more flavorful new varieties like the hugely popular Ambrosia™ apple.
This apple is different because it's part of a trend in apple growing and marketing that offers customers a wider selection of premium quality apples called "club apples." These new varieties are patented, trademarked, and licensed to a select "club" of farmers that cultivate and sell them under strict rules that control cultivation, harvest, packing, storage, and marketing practices to ensure consistent quality no matter where you buy the apples. Other apples that have been developed this way include popular varieties like SweeTango®, Kiku®, and Jazz™ and there are more to come in the future.
The question consumers must now ask is: "Can we help play a role in preserving biological diversity by demanding new apple varieties be non GMO and while also preserving heirloom, vintage breeds whose premium qualities keeps the gene pool healthy and vibrant?"
Summer Whitford is the D.C. Editor and a food, drink and travel writer at The Daily Meal. In addition to lifestyle topics, Summer also writes about culture and the arts at Woman Around Town. You can follow her on Twitter @FoodandWineDiva and on Instagram at thefoodandwinediva.