Apple as Art, as Lore

Love this clever little image. Reminds me of Michael Pollan's book, "The Botony of Desire" and all of the history and facts about apples included therein. Tidbits like the origin of apples being the central steppes of Asia. The nation of Kazakhstan to be specific, who's capital Alma Ata literally translates as "The Father of the Apple". Long way from there is its transformation into America's most patriotic fruit!

The apple is very much like us in that the seeds of every apple contain a unique genetic code. The offspring can be as much like or as imaginably different from the parent as our children. This is called, "heterozygotism," and apples exhibit this characteristic in the extreme. In an apple core this means that the ONLY way to get a replica of an existing variety is to graft it. Err, that would be the old-fashioned version of cloning.

So this particular apple carved into the world came from a progenator that appeared in the field of an Iowa farmer in the 1870's. It wasn't something he anticipated and so in plowing his fields, he wacked it back. But as anyone who owns an apple tree can testify, they are as tenacious as any weed. So for a couple of years, Jesse Hiatt, wacked back this obnoxious plant, but eventually he let the tree grow and thereby discovered the amazing fruit it produced. In 1880, he entered it in a competition which it won, and then sold the rights to a commercial interest who named it Red Delicious and began it's journey into the pantheon of all American apple history. Every single Red delicious apple ever eaten, admired, turned into cider, whatever, since then is a clone of a clone of a clone of that scrappy little volunteer apple tree on that rural Iowa farm. And now someone carves one into a map of the world--how fitting.