5 ms·

I found an apple tree on an island in the middle of a lake once, while out kayaking. It had apparently been there for quite some time, completely untended to by

I found an apple tree on an island in the middle of a lake once, while out kayaking. It had apparently been there for quite some time, completely untended to by human hands. I was excited to try a "natural" apple, for whatever reason I had the idea that it would be tastier than store bought apples. I regretted biting into it pretty much immediately. It was my first lesson on the importance of artificial selection in the palatability of our produce. I have found out, since then, that apples grown for their edibility are grown from grafts, not seeds. Most likely, someone at some point stopped on that island and had lunch, and left apple seeds on the island, which eventually grew into a wild apple tree. Wild apples aren't edible, and the apples we know and love have been carefully bred to be the way they are.

Jedd 8y ago
This isn't strictly accurate. In Kent, UK, there's an orchard with around 2,000 apple varieties (it's possible there were closer to 10,000 over the past few centuries). I'd guess more than a hundred of those wouldn't be palatable for consumption - varieties that have been selected for sauce, baking, cider, jelly (jam), etc. Any seed-grown tree is going to produce fruit that has characteristics of both its parents - so it's not that 'wild apples aren't edible' (clearly that's not true) but rather hybrid apples aren't exactly like either parent. This is neither a bad nor a good thing. I will say that apples grown for their type are replicated via grafts or cuttings.
- minikites 8y ago
  >Any seed-grown tree is going to produce fruit that has characteristics of both its parents Not apples, they're exactly the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple#Breeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple#Breeding >This is because seedling apples are an example of "extreme heterozygotes", in that rather than inheriting genes from their parents to create a new apple with parental characteristics, they are instead significantly different from their parents, perhaps to compete with the many pests.
  - Jedd 8y ago
    Perhaps not exactly the opposite (I'm not even sure how that'd work). Apple breeders do identify favourable traits from existing cultivars, and may then do selective back-crossing: https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/844-breeding-a-new-apple-cultivar https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/844-breeding-a-new...
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  As mimikites mentions every apple from seed is a complete unknown bearing no resemblance to parents. Some will be edible, many will be horrible. Find an edible one, keep that tree safe for grafts and cuttings! For instance all granny smith's trace back to a single tree somewhere in Australia. If you let a variety die, it's gone forever as you'll never recreate it. Which is my biggest regret of the way supermarkets want to sell us just a few "standard" varieties. Countless fine apples have been lost forever.
  - Jedd 8y ago
    Yes, I understand. I grow about 25 varieties of apples, some of which are extremely unpleasant to eat, but have been selected over centuries to be perfect for jams (crab apples) and cider making. While a random specimen on an island in a lake is indeed most likely a seedling, my point was that assessing the quality of an apple is more nuanced than noting if one fruit at one point in time tastes nice.
    - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
      OK, on that part we're in full agreement. One of my biggest regrets of modern food stores is the complete disappearance of local and more specialist apples - my personal favourites haven't been around for years. Which leaves few options for those without space for a dozen varieties.
      - Jedd 8y ago
        I'd love to have more, but they're tricky in my climate (too hot and dry), and in Australia there's about 200-300 varieties only AFAIK. If you're in / next time you are in the UK, be sure to get out to Brogdale - they have apple and cherry and cider festivals, with an astounding number of varieties (only two of each tree though). It is profoundly sad that it's such a painful process to get varieties through quarantine and into Australia - I tried a Braddick's Nonpareil there one time - my instant favourite apple ever. May be similar to a Sturmer Pippin (which is available in AU).
pingec 8y ago
You have to stop the human intervention at the right moment though. In my country there are maybe 10 apple varieties that are grown commercially and they are surely tastier than their wild ancestors. However, taste is just one of many criteria when deciding which apples to grow. For example there are 50 years old apple trees in my neighbour's garden that are oh-my-god out of this world tasty. They are also small, do not produce regular quantities each year and prone to diseases. So they are not viable for commercial use but still the best apple you have ever tasted if you manage to find one. So perhaps organic could also mean focusing on other criteria than growing fruit that is most viable to grow in huge quantities, that is more resistant to various diseases and other chemicals that kill insects/fungi, that look beautiful and have a long shelf life and taste good enough.
- colechristensen 8y ago
  I think we should stop using shallow adjectives to signal quality. "organic" is just a marketing label. Instead of trying to sort everything into two bins and decide how to gatekeep "organic" how about we do science and education and labeling to teach people the details of how their food is bred and produced and how quality and effects vary.
  - strainer 8y ago
    Organic is not a marketing label - here[1] are the extra regulations which any food labelled as organic in US must be certified to satisfy. These regulations have been developed and studied for decades, here is one recent review [2] [1]https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1025eb0e6b67cadf9d3b40&rgn=div6&view=text&node=7:3.1.1.9.32.7 https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1... [2]https://phys.org/news/2016-02-agriculture-key-world-sustainably.html https://phys.org/news/2016-02-agriculture-key-world-sustaina...
- vram22 8y ago
  Interesting points.. >For example there are 50 years old apple trees in my neighbour's garden that are oh-my-god out of this world tasty. Ha ha, I've eaten a few Indian fruits that are like that, both as a kid and later. One is jujube [1], called ber in Hindi. When living in Central India as a teenager, used to wander around in open, lightly forested areas near the town, which had these ber trees. We used to eat plenty of their fruit for free. Very tasty. Sweet. The still-slightly-unripe ones were the best. Overripe ones had a bit of a bad smell though. Yellowish-green in color when under-ripe, red when ripe, a bit smaller than, or the same size as a golf ball. I think they probably were high in sugar (fructose, maybe) since when sold in bazaars, flies were usually buzzing around them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jujube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jujube Another one was karonda [2]. Tangy, sour, astringent, may best describe its taste. Makes your mouth literally water - a lot. Punjabi people make a pickle from it. I had some of that pickle once in a Bangalore restaurant. Mind-blowing taste. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carissa_carandas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carissa_carandas
gameswithgo 8y ago
johnny appleseed was kind of a hippie and wouldn't do the grafting thing, all the trees he sold were of the type you can't eat. only thing you can do with those is make alcohol. he was an alcohol merchant!
SilasX 8y ago
It's not an unvarnished good. Modern candies and apples have dulled modern tastebuds to sweetness so that you need a lot more sugar to like it. High dietary sugar is like a tobacco reboot.
wool_gather 8y ago
Wild apples can be edible (and it's not like they're poisonous, just not tasty), but, yeah, they're usually best for just making jam. (They have lots of pectin, so they're a good adjunct for things -- blackberries, for example -- that don't.) Apples are a bit special in that they don't grow true to seed; that's the reason for the grafting. If you plant a Braeburn, you don't get Braeburn fruit.

Jedd 8y ago

This isn't strictly accurate. In Kent, UK, there's an orchard with around 2,000 apple varieties (it's possible there were closer to 10,000 over the past few centuries). I'd guess more than a hundred of those wouldn't be palatable for consumption - varieties that have been selected for sauce, baking, cider, jelly (jam), etc. Any seed-grown tree is going to produce fruit that has characteristics of both its parents - so it's not that 'wild apples aren't edible' (clearly that's not true) but rather hybrid apples aren't exactly like either parent. This is neither a bad nor a good thing. I will say that apples grown for their type are replicated via grafts or cuttings.

minikites 8y ago
>Any seed-grown tree is going to produce fruit that has characteristics of both its parents Not apples, they're exactly the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple#Breeding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple#Breeding >This is because seedling apples are an example of "extreme heterozygotes", in that rather than inheriting genes from their parents to create a new apple with parental characteristics, they are instead significantly different from their parents, perhaps to compete with the many pests.
- Jedd 8y ago
  Perhaps not exactly the opposite (I'm not even sure how that'd work). Apple breeders do identify favourable traits from existing cultivars, and may then do selective back-crossing: https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/844-breeding-a-new-apple-cultivar https://www.sciencelearn.org.nz/resources/844-breeding-a-new...
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
As mimikites mentions every apple from seed is a complete unknown bearing no resemblance to parents. Some will be edible, many will be horrible. Find an edible one, keep that tree safe for grafts and cuttings! For instance all granny smith's trace back to a single tree somewhere in Australia. If you let a variety die, it's gone forever as you'll never recreate it. Which is my biggest regret of the way supermarkets want to sell us just a few "standard" varieties. Countless fine apples have been lost forever.
- Jedd 8y ago
  Yes, I understand. I grow about 25 varieties of apples, some of which are extremely unpleasant to eat, but have been selected over centuries to be perfect for jams (crab apples) and cider making. While a random specimen on an island in a lake is indeed most likely a seedling, my point was that assessing the quality of an apple is more nuanced than noting if one fruit at one point in time tastes nice.
  - NeedMoreTea 8y ago
    OK, on that part we're in full agreement. One of my biggest regrets of modern food stores is the complete disappearance of local and more specialist apples - my personal favourites haven't been around for years. Which leaves few options for those without space for a dozen varieties.
    - Jedd 8y ago
      I'd love to have more, but they're tricky in my climate (too hot and dry), and in Australia there's about 200-300 varieties only AFAIK. If you're in / next time you are in the UK, be sure to get out to Brogdale - they have apple and cherry and cider festivals, with an astounding number of varieties (only two of each tree though). It is profoundly sad that it's such a painful process to get varieties through quarantine and into Australia - I tried a Braddick's Nonpareil there one time - my instant favourite apple ever. May be similar to a Sturmer Pippin (which is available in AU).

pingec 8y ago

You have to stop the human intervention at the right moment though. In my country there are maybe 10 apple varieties that are grown commercially and they are surely tastier than their wild ancestors. However, taste is just one of many criteria when deciding which apples to grow. For example there are 50 years old apple trees in my neighbour's garden that are oh-my-god out of this world tasty. They are also small, do not produce regular quantities each year and prone to diseases. So they are not viable for commercial use but still the best apple you have ever tasted if you manage to find one. So perhaps organic could also mean focusing on other criteria than growing fruit that is most viable to grow in huge quantities, that is more resistant to various diseases and other chemicals that kill insects/fungi, that look beautiful and have a long shelf life and taste good enough.

colechristensen 8y ago
I think we should stop using shallow adjectives to signal quality. "organic" is just a marketing label. Instead of trying to sort everything into two bins and decide how to gatekeep "organic" how about we do science and education and labeling to teach people the details of how their food is bred and produced and how quality and effects vary.
- strainer 8y ago
  Organic is not a marketing label - here[1] are the extra regulations which any food labelled as organic in US must be certified to satisfy. These regulations have been developed and studied for decades, here is one recent review [2] [1]https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1025eb0e6b67cadf9d3b40&rgn=div6&view=text&node=7:3.1.1.9.32.7 https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?c=ecfr&SID=9874504b6f1... [2]https://phys.org/news/2016-02-agriculture-key-world-sustainably.html https://phys.org/news/2016-02-agriculture-key-world-sustaina...
vram22 8y ago
Interesting points.. >For example there are 50 years old apple trees in my neighbour's garden that are oh-my-god out of this world tasty. Ha ha, I've eaten a few Indian fruits that are like that, both as a kid and later. One is jujube [1], called ber in Hindi. When living in Central India as a teenager, used to wander around in open, lightly forested areas near the town, which had these ber trees. We used to eat plenty of their fruit for free. Very tasty. Sweet. The still-slightly-unripe ones were the best. Overripe ones had a bit of a bad smell though. Yellowish-green in color when under-ripe, red when ripe, a bit smaller than, or the same size as a golf ball. I think they probably were high in sugar (fructose, maybe) since when sold in bazaars, flies were usually buzzing around them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jujube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jujube Another one was karonda [2]. Tangy, sour, astringent, may best describe its taste. Makes your mouth literally water - a lot. Punjabi people make a pickle from it. I had some of that pickle once in a Bangalore restaurant. Mind-blowing taste. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carissa_carandas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carissa_carandas

gameswithgo 8y ago

johnny appleseed was kind of a hippie and wouldn't do the grafting thing, all the trees he sold were of the type you can't eat. only thing you can do with those is make alcohol. he was an alcohol merchant!

SilasX 8y ago

It's not an unvarnished good. Modern candies and apples have dulled modern tastebuds to sweetness so that you need a lot more sugar to like it. High dietary sugar is like a tobacco reboot.

wool_gather 8y ago

Wild apples can be edible (and it's not like they're poisonous, just not tasty), but, yeah, they're usually best for just making jam. (They have lots of pectin, so they're a good adjunct for things -- blackberries, for example -- that don't.) Apples are a bit special in that they don't grow true to seed; that's the reason for the grafting. If you plant a Braeburn, you don't get Braeburn fruit.