“Why do they keep making these?” I groaned aloud while watching the latest Matrix reboot with my older brothers. I was projecting. Why do we keep watching these?
It was an Abilene paradox: when we go along with what we think the group wants, despite none of us wanting it.
We’ve created many such paradoxes and scaled them. Sequels, reboots, and live-action remakes. Selfies. Dating Apps. Balenciaga. LinkedIn.
We cower in contrived consensus.
But there’s one paradox so seemingly benign it’s all the more insidious. Why are apples everywhere when they’re nobody’s favorite fruit?
As a child, I found it absurd. Apples weren’t bad, but nobody ever craved one. Apples were for people who never tasted other fruit like how parades are for people who’ve never been entertained.
They were suspiciously self-promoting:
Red Delicious – Here, kid
Gala – La-di-da
Fuji – Good enough for the Japanese
Granny Smith – Please come in at once
Globalization would fix this, I presumed. Temperature-controlled logistics would bring us the good fruits, maybe the great ones.
Alas, apples still command every produce area, front and center, like the bookstore self-help section that shoves anything of substance against the walls or out of print.
Was this ubiquity the malice of Big Apple or some tragedy of errors? It turns out apples are victims of their own success.
"Up until Prohibition, an apple grown in America was far less likely to be eaten than to wind up in a barrel of cider," writes Michael Pollan in The Botany of Desire. We fed the crushed remains to the swine.
But then we learned how to harvest and store apples year-round. Sustenance promoted by scarcity. We tweaked further for shelf life, color, and texture until we got a shiny, perfectly inoffensive object devoid of taste and nuance. As if HR made a fruit.
We often use the word vanilla for something trite or banal, but it’s a criminally unfair metaphor. Vanilla—real vanilla—is exquisite. It’s creamy, floral, and sweet with notes of smoke, butter, and oak. Its fragrance serene, sensual, warm. Vanilla is not vanilla.
How do we describe the taste of apples? It’s either sweet or tart. Out of thousands of varieties, an apple’s flavor profile is just the feature of every ripe or unripe fruit. All other descriptors are on texture or color. OK, I once heard earthy, a characteristic no civilian wants in coffee or cabernet.
I have never seen apple-flavored ice cream, and I have sailed the seven seas. I know it exists like I know a yellow-billed tit-tyrant does, but I’ve never seen one. Because apple isn’t a flavor. Nobody’s clamoring for sweet-flavored ice cream or for tart in their sundae.
“But everyone loves apple pie!” you spray. A heated slice of sugary dough with a fructose center, saturated in cinnamon, under a heaping scoop of oh-guess-what vanilla ice cream? Served like that I’d give human flesh a chance.
Apples are fucking vanilla.
They’re high in pesticides and sugar and low in nutritional density. Apple juice—a concentrate from rejects on BRICS farm floors—ought to be banned immediately while we draft sanctions. It’s as healthy as a Fanta.
Apples do not keep doctors away. Our decisions do.
God explicitly told us not to eat from the one apple tree, as depicted. We ignored Him and the pleas of artists for millennia, and that’s what got us here.
We’d awaken to scores of Abilene paradoxes in our food if we were more present. Anemic cantaloupe cubes as 80% of fruit cups. Free killer peanuts from zero-margin airlines. While neither vegans nor decaf drinkers are inherently evil, their demands are wasteful. Picture the untouched vegan options every caterer oversupplies out of fear. The 96% of brewed decaf that goes unconsumed.
Imagine if we took everything we’ve learned about nutrition and flavor and started improving and promoting foods that we both want and need. Imagine Southwest handing you complimentary macadamias.
I’ve got a Swiftian proposal that I mean in earnest.
Repurpose apples as livestock feed. Like we used to. Replace the industrial-grade, hormone-enriched, antibiotic-laced-turned-resistant gruel that animals currently subsist on with abundant, sweet-or-tart, juicy, crunchy apples. Animals fucking love apples. Let’s lighten their suffering.
It’d be better for the environment. 67% of agricultural crops grown in the US go to animal feed, nearly all from landscape-leveling annual harvests of soil-sucking, chemically-soaked grains. We’d inherit a mammoth land surplus.
Good.
Grow cherries, nectarines, peaches, plums, pears, persimmons, apricots, and figs.
Grow hazelnuts, walnuts, and pecans.
Grow blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries.
Grow anything but apples.
God created the apple for something. But he was damn clear it wasn’t for us.
P.S. Don’t come at me. Some of my best friends eat apples.
Ha, I'm reminded of this essay:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-life-of-maya-millennial/
Apples are premium mediocre!
Great writing, keep it up!