The Great Apple Fallacy

Mediocrity and the Forbidden Fruit

Son of Man, René Magritte (1964)

“Why do they keep making these?” I groaned while watching the latest Matrix installment 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 others want, despite none of us wanting it. 

We’ve created many such paradoxes and scaled them. Sequels and remakes no one asked for. Selfies. Dating apps. Balenciaga. LinkedIn.

We cower in contrived consensus. 

But there’s one paradox so seemingly benign that 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’d 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. 

Then they came for the pears, and I did not speak out

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. The crushed remains were cast to the swine.

Then we learned how to harvest and store apples year-round. Sustenance promoted by scarcity. We tweaked further for shelf life, pigment, and texture until we got a shiny, 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 silken with notes of smoke, butter, and oak. Its fragrance serene, sensual, warm. Vanilla is not vanilla.

How do we describe the taste of apples? They’re 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 is not a flavor. Nobody’s clamoring for extra sweet or tart in their sundae.

“But everyone loves apple pie!” you spray. Do you mean a heated slice of sugary folded 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 disproportionally high in sugar and pesticides and low in nutritional density. Apple juice—a concentrate from rotting 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. 

Adam and Eve, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1525)

We’d awaken to scores of Abilene paradoxes in our food if we were more present. Anemic cantaloupe cubes as 80% of plastic 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 meatless options every caterer oversupplies out of fear. The 96% of brewed decaf that goes unconsumed. 

Imagine we took everything we’ve learned about nutrition and flavor and simply produced food 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 we feed them. Animals fucking love apples. Let’s lighten their suffering.  

It’d be better for the environment. 67% of crops grown in the US go to animal feed, which comes from landscape-leveling, wildlife-massacreing annual harvests of chemically-soaked, soil-sucking 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. 

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P.S. Don’t come at me. Some of my best friends eat apples.