An Apple A Day ....

“The apple served as the American grape,

cider the American wine”.

Michael Pollan, Botany of Desire

“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”. Do you know that this is actually a marketing slogan dreamed up by apple growers who were concerned that "temperance" by puritan Christians would cut into their sales. .

During our sabbatical in the US, we enjoyed drinking apple cider - 100% pressed cloudy apple juice! You could either drink it cold or hot. I learnt to like the drink so much so that it was the only food item that I brought back (two boxes, each containing 10 sachets of powdered apple cider) to Singapore.

In the olden days, apples were something people drank. Cider was the fate of most apples grown in America. Allowed to ferment for a few weeks, pressed apple juice yields a mildly alcoholic beverage with about half the strength of wine. For something stronger, the cider can be distilled into brandy or simply frozen; the intensely alcoholic liquid that refuses to ice is called applejack. Hard cider frozen to -30* yields an applejack of 66%. visit this blog has a good write-up & pictures on the tedious process involved in making apple cider: http://www.sentex.net/~mwandel/press/making_cider.html

In the 1800s, virtually every homestead in America had an orchard from which literally thousand gallons of cider were made every year. In rural areas cider took the place not only of wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water.

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Indeed, in many places, cider were consumed more freely than water, even by children, since it was arguably the healthier – because more sanitary – beverage. Cider became indispensable to rural life that even those who rallied against alcohol made an exception for cider, and the early prohibitionists succeeded mainly in switching drinkers over from grain to apple spirits. Eventually, they would attack cider directly and launch their campaign to chop down apple trees.

The apple growers then came together to save the industry. Thanks in part to the PR slogan: “An apple a day keeps the doctor away”, Americans began to eat rather than drink their apples. Around the same time, refrigeration made possible a national market for apples, and the industry got together and decided it would be wise to simplify that market by planting and promoting only a small handful of brand name varieties.

Two qualities counted: Beauty and sweetness. Beauty in an apple meant a uniform redness; and sweetness in an apple meant sugariness, plain and simple. And so, the Red and Golden Delicious, began to dominate the market... Apple breeders lean heavily to the genes of these two apples, which can be found in most of the popular apples developed in the recent years, including the Fuji and the Gala.

Hence, it wasn’t until this century that the apple acquired its reputation for wholesomeness!

The identification of the apple with the notions of health and wholesomeness turns out to be a modern invention, part of a public relations campaign dreamed up by the apple industry in the early 1900s to reposition a fruit that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had declared war on.

photos: taken in State College (2008)

source: Botany of Desire (2001)