The juicy history of the apple

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Pen Volger has narrated this article for you to listen to.

In Food for Life, Tim Spector’s book on the science of eating, the author gives the chemical makeup of a mystery food, listing more than 30 scary-sounding E numbers, sugars, acids and chemicals, before revealing that it is an… apple. Sally Coulthard’s book shows that it’s the apple’s complexity as well as its familiarity, that makes it the ideal punchline for Spector, and, for Coulthard, a perfect vehicle to carry the history of how we grow, trade, cook and eat together and take responsibility for each other and the environment (or not). 

What we think of as an apple today – the sweet Japanese Fuji, the American picture-book Red Delicious or the sharper, Brit-friendly Cox or Bramley – owes its gamut of qualities to an easygoing readiness to adapt to local conditions. Coulthard’s story begins with the ancient ancestor of the Gala and Granny Smith, which hitchhiked west from the wild apple forests of the Kazakhstan mountains, promiscuously mixing with local crab apples along the way. The resulting hybrids produced fruit with qualities we still appreciate – sweetness and acidity, texture, disease-resistance and storability – and sweetened lives and flavoured cultures as they travelled. Greeks, Romans, Norse and Celts rooted their fertility myths in the apple’s embrace. Milton retrofitted the apple to the Bible’s generic ‘fruit of the tree of knowledge’, making the most of the Latin malus for apple and evil. 

The apple is core to our history. I make no promises the puns will stop there, because, as Coulthard shows, in this crisp and refreshing account, apples and humans have been through so much together, it is natural they should share a language too. They crop up in surprising linguistic by-ways: Avalon is the island of apple trees; the old-fashioned hair grease, Pomade, was made from the pulp of apples; costermongers sold Costards, which pop up in Edward I’s fruit bowl.