Erika Janik - Apple: A Global History

Although I grew up in Washington state, a place known for its apples, my first transcendent apple experience occurred 2,000 miles away in Wisconsin a place more known for its cheese, sausage and beer than its apples. But there, at the Dane County Farmers Market in Madison, a homely, yellow-brown, faintly blushed Pink Pearl apple seduced its way into my bag and, later that night, turned my Red Delicious world upside down. The crisp skin gave way to a marbled pink and white interior so alternately sweet and tart on first bite that tears sprang to my eyes. How could an apple taste so good? And why had it taken more than two decades of good but frankly, not great apple consumption to reach this point?

The apple market had clearly changed since this hard-to-find Pink Pearl apple was developed in 1944, a descendant of an ancient line of red-fleshed Turkish crab apples. Although thousands of apple cultivars are known around the world, barely twenty varieties are widely available in local supermarkets. Those twenty varieties account for 90 per cent of all apples consumed. Apples were one of the first fruits cultivated by humans and have long been one of the most important fruits in Europe, North America and other temperate regions of the globe both for food and drink. But today appleshave become global commodities, valued more for their long storage life and transportability than for their astonishing variety and flavour.

William Morris, Apple wallpaper, 1877.

The apples story is, as Henry David Thoreau observed, remarkably connected with that of man. Born in the mountains of Kazakhstan, it has travelled the globe and become, through its own prodigality and attachment to people, a species at home almost anywhere. 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 and all this in addition to being just good eating and drinking. The apple has achieved its global prominence through its adaptability to local cultures and climates, itsconvenience and nutritional value, and its easy transport over long distances; all qualities that allowed the apple to infiltrate the worlds soil and change how people ate in the process.

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From Almaty to America

A seed hidden in the heart of an apple is an orchard invisible.
Welsh proverb

In early September of 1929, Nikolai Vavilov, famed Russian plant explorer and botanist, arrived in the central Asian cross-roads of Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan. Climbing up the Zailijskei Alatau slopes of the Tian Shan mountains separating Kazakhstan from China, Vavilov found thickets of wild apples stretching in every direction, an extensive forest of fruit coloured russet red, creamy yellow and vibrant pink. Nowhere else in the world do apples grow thickly as a forest or with such incredible diversity. Amazed by what he saw, Vavilov wrote: I could see with my own eyes that I had stumbled upon the centre of origin for the apple.

With extraordinary prescience and few facts, Vavilov suggested that the wild apples he had seen growing in the Tian Shan were in fact the ancestors of the modern apple. He tracked the whole process of domestication to the mountains near Alma-Ata, where the wild apples looked awfully similar to the apples found at the local grocery. Unfortunately, Vavilovs theory would remain mostly unknown for decades.

A branch thick with apples.

Auguste Renoir, The Apple Seller, c. 1890.

Exactly where the apple came from had long been a matter of contention and discussion among people who study plant origins. Vavilov, imprisoned by Joseph Stalin in 1940 for his work in genetics during the Lysenko Affair, died in a Leningrad prison in 1943. Only after the fall of communism in Russia did Vavilovs theory, made more than half a century earlier, become widely recognized.

As Vavilov predicted, its now believed that all of the apples known today are direct descendents of the wild apples that evolved in Kazakhstan. Apples do not comprise all of Kazakhstans plant bounty, however. At least 157 other plant species found in Kazakhstan are either direct descendants or close wild relatives of domesticated crops, including 90 per cent of all cultivated temperate fruits. The name of Kazakhstans largest city, Alma-Ata, or Almaty as it is known today,even translates as Father of Apples or, according to some, where the apples are. So this news about the apples origins was probably no surprise to residents, particularly in towns where apple seedlings are known to grow up through the cracks in the pavements. The apple has been evolving in Central Asia for upwards of 4.5 million years.