Save the Apples

[ysabetwordsmith]

The narrow genetic stock of domesticated apples may not survive climate change without help from wild ancestors.

Comments

Other varieties of apple

[dialecticdreamer]

There ARE heirloom strains still in limited cultivation. I know of a few small farms here in California which specialize in some of the lesser known strains. The most significant problem with these strains is that they BRUISE LIKE MAD. The more widely available a strain is, it's likely down to both size of fruit and the resistance to bruising. (And now I'm hungry for Braeburn apples in particular.)

Re: Other varieties of apple

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> There ARE heirloom strains still in limited cultivation. <<

Many of them, yes; the problem is that the big commercial farms are limited, with heirloom apples restricted to small suppliers.

>> I know of a few small farms here in California which specialize in some of the lesser known strains. <<

We have some around here too. Guy south of us grows Arkansas Blacks ... in Illinois, and they are tasty, which says right there how fucked up the climate already is.

>> The most significant problem with these strains is that they BRUISE LIKE MAD. <<

Heirlooms all have different advantages and disadvantages. Russets, you can darn near bounce them off a wall and they won't bruise, they're sweet as sugar, and some bugs can't get through the skin; but that skin is tough, and people don't like how they look.

>> The more widely available a strain is, it's likely down to both size of fruit and the resistance to bruising. (And now I'm hungry for Braeburn apples in particular.) <<

They're selecting for production convenience, not hardiness or flavor. It's a problem.

Re: Other varieties of apple

[dialecticdreamer]

Absolutely. One way to really /convince/ someone of this is to have them come pick a ripe tomato from the back yard and compare that to /anything/ put in a store, even the "organic heirloom varieties". They also don't ship well, which means corporate farming is all about scale and picking green, then ripening with exposure to nitrogen.

Which is about as appetizing as eating Styrofoam.

Re: Other varieties of apple

[ysabetwordsmith]

And then they wonder why most people don't eat fresh fruits and vegetables anymore. It's because the industry made them widely available but no longer worth eating.

Re: Other varieties of apple

[corvi]

I hear you on the bruising! We have a ghost-apple tree, white skins and transparent flesh, and they get hand-print bruises just from being gently picked. They're certainly beautiful in a slightly eerie glass-and-bone sort of way, but totally useless. We have to feed them to the goats.

Re: Other varieties of apple

[dialecticdreamer]

G-ds, those are GORGEOUS. But not edible? Not even as dried leather? SAAAD for you, happy for goats.

You raise goats? Grin. Hubby would never, ever go for it... he prefers his meat, in particular, to be safely divorced and sanitized from the actual "farm experience". He's an Indianapolis boy (for the first seventeen years,) and it shows!

Me, I can barely keep up with the /front/ lawn. (Back yard is youngest kid's job-for-money around the house. A true farm, self-sustaining 2K kCalories a day for four people, WAAY out of range for the space I've got. The local farmer's markets were a big, well-kept secret until the last two years. Now there are farms from a hundred miles away at booths, and others with products that have /very/ little to do with food.

Re: Other varieties of apple

[corvi]

I hadn't thought to try drying them, thanks! Hopefully I will remember to try that this year. We've tried applesauce, but it didn't taste like anything, but maybe drying would be better, more flavor concentration? I would really like to find something to do with the ghost-apples. They're not even good for cider.

We are too soft-hearted to eat our goats. We keep them for milk. We sometimes fantasize about trying to make a living selling goat cheese and figs, but the income would be too uncertain, so it remains a remarkably time-consuming hobby, we're nowhere near self-sustaining.

[cmcmck]

This area of the UK is a major fruit growing region and we have a fruit preservation lab at a place called Brogdale not so far from us which preserves and crosses old and new varieties and researches old varieties.

An apple is never just an apple around here. My own favourite variety is the humble Egremont Russet which is not one for people who buy fruit with their eyes.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I buy russets when I can get them, for the flavor.

*laugh* Hell, I buy ANY apple I've never tried before. Sometimes there are surprises. Got some Pink Pearls that turned out to be very tart, and I'd only heard of pinks as dessert apples. I figured since they tasted like cooking apples, I'd try that -- and they made the loveliest pink apple pie.

Re: Yes...

[cmcmck]

The great cooker here is the Bramley which makes a sublime apple pie!

[dialecticdreamer]

Around this house, apples never last long enough to become pie.

Which is why I favor Braeburns. There's a randomity to the sweet-tart range that keeps the six-foot locust guessing. Just for fun, try some mutsu (if you can find them anywhere else; I haven't seen them outside of Ca.)

[hrafn]

I've seen mutsus in Oregon; there's a HUGE apple growing area here and in Washington. A local nursery in Portland does a big apple tasting festival for two weekends in October, and they bring in literally dozens of varieties, with a number of really interesting unusual apples (also pears). Some of the local groceries carry heirloom varieties I have never seen in big stores (or outside of Oregon).

A lousy gardener but

[dialecticdreamer]

I've got a common Fuji in the back yard, praying it'll grow (Mother's day present last year). /IF/ I can get that tree to live, I'm looking for a dwarf variety of something really, really strange. I mean, it's a hobby.

We /adore/ white eggplant, purple tomatoes and potatoes, cranberry beans (though I couldn't get those to grow)... you get the idea.

Anyway, contact your local Cooperative Extension office-- I can call UC Davis with all /kinds/ of weird questions-- and I had to, as I blew a disc in my back about four years ago; it changed /everything/ I can do in the garden.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I have tried Mutsu apples but wasn't impressed. Braeburns are nice.

My favorite variety is Ginger Gold, a dessert apple only available for about two weeks in early August. Exquisite, delicate flavor with a real ginger note.

Don't forget the additives!

[dialecticdreamer]

They take something pretty good, wheat, take off the germ and let it sit for months before processing, which turns it into something almost /completely/ tasteless, and then have to add tons of "flavor additives" (read: crap)in order to sell something like a CRACKER. Seriously. Homemade crackers, no cheese, no herbs mixed in, are actually FLAVORFUL. Adding spices and herbs can become overload.

In the two years before my back decided it wasn't going to play nicely with anything, including gravity, one of my gardening goals was to simply grow enough of ONE fruit or vegetable so we didn't have to touch store-bought for fresh -- the unanimous, hands-down favorite item was tomatoes. The first year, I planted twenty four DIFFERENT varieties of tomatoes, for four people. Decent yield, at least two or three fist-sized ripe fruit per day.

I have no idea what the total yield was: NONE of those fruits made it far enough into the house to be /weighed/, or even washed in the /sink/. The kids /did/ learn to rinse the fruit off at the garden tap, at least.

Re: Don't forget the additives!

[ysabetwordsmith]

*laugh* Yeah, my parents had a hard time teaching me to carry things to the pump instead of putting them straight into my mouth.

In the same vein

[dialecticdreamer]

Check out Wired:
http://io9.com/how-hyperpalatable-foods-could-turn-you-into-a-food-add-1575144399

Food engineered to be addictive, easy to consume, and light up the reward center of the brain like a slot machine.

Re: In the same vein

[ysabetwordsmith]

If you're in the middle of the bell curve, it's addictive. If you're on the fringes, there's a lot of food you find inedible.

I love apples, chicken, and oranges.

I like Dairy Queen ice cream and DiGiorno's pizza is okay. I loathe McDonald's. Even with the ice cream, I prefer homemade. I eat convenience foods because they're convenient, not because they taste better to me. I try to find ways of making homemade food more convenient -- hence cooking spaghetti sauce and sloppy joe mix in huge batches to freeze.

Re: In the same vein

[dialecticdreamer]

Food allergies or sensitivities may, in fact, be Nature's way of fighting back against engineered foods.

If you can't digest Red Dye #7, or Blue #3, there are SO MANY foods that just can't come into the house that you're automatically limiting /some/ of the vectors for engineered foods.

But Trader Joe's and the organic-vegan-amazing CORPORATE food production uses the exact same techniques to engineer granola bars, breakfast cereals, et alia. It's /always/ wise to be cautious, because big food is very much like Big Pharm-- they want your money, not what is /best/ for you.

Re: In the same vein

[ysabetwordsmith]

If you can't have high-fructose corn syrup, there goes over 90% of the groceries and many entire product categories.

I agree that the skyrocketing rates of food allergies are because food has been made hazardous to people's health.

Re: In the same vein

[dialecticdreamer]

What if you're not sensitive to/ allergic to corn or HFCS, but you don't want GMO foods? Corn is a MAJOR problem in this respect, and the US FDA is flat-out refusing to demand labeling. Corn from many, many sources is turned into corn meal, corn starch, and HFCS, and the blended prodcuts have absolutely NO accountability, trackback for GMO, among other things.

I don't even know where to /start/ with that, other than /never/ eating anything with corn products in it. (Waves sadly at favorite brand of soda.) The thing is, I genuinely think that it's made as DIFFICULT as possible to avoid these things. But I'm not sure /why/. Who benefits from /demanding/ that we consume things like fluoridated water, iodized salt, or GMO grain?

Re: In the same vein

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> What if you're not sensitive to/ allergic to corn or HFCS, but you don't want GMO foods? <<

Then you're fucked. Also, if you're allergic to one type of GMO corn but not another, it creates an erratic pattern that's impossible to separate variables with information permitted to consumers; so you have to boycott all the corn instead of just the corn you can't eat. This is true of many allergens, which are permitted throughout the food supply with a label that says things "might" contain them. You have no way to know what's really safe and what isn't.

>> The thing is, I genuinely think that it's made as DIFFICULT as possible to avoid these things. But I'm not sure /why/. Who benefits from /demanding/ that we consume things like fluoridated water, iodized salt, or GMO grain? <<

Those in power who find a sick populace easier to control than a healthy one. Those who sell drugs to sick or depressed people. Those who want to sell products as cheaply as possible and don't care if they kill people.

Re: In the same vein

[corvi]

> Who benefits from /demanding/ that we consume things like fluoridated water, iodized salt, or GMO grain?

Nobody benefits from iodized salt or fluoridated water, the additives are cheap and used in minuscule amounts. They're just there to prevent diseases that were common in America in the early 1900s (iodine-deficiency developmental disabilities and tooth decay, respectively).

While there are some mountainous parts of the world with iodine-poor soil where iodine-deficiency is a serious issue and I wish iodized salt was widely available there, I don't think we'd see any problems if we suddenly discontinued iodized salt in America. The people who live in regions of America where there is no iodine in the soil probably eat enough food trucked in from elsewhere that they'd be alright.

Fluoridation may also be unnecessary in America at this point. European countries have reduced tooth decay as much as America has, without fluoridating water, just by offering free dental care to children in schools, that seems like a better way to go about it, but politically unfeasible here.

GMO foods are actually profitable, unlike adding nutrients in tiny quantities to salt or water. All genetic modifications approved by the FDA so far make food easier to grow or ship; no modification aimed at making food tastier or more nutritious is in production yet. GMOs benefit large-scale farmers and seed-selling corporations.

Possibly easier-to-grow food is cheaper, and savings are passed onto broke customers? That would be nice, but I don't know if it is actually working that way. Cynicism says, "probably not." :/

Re: In the same vein

[ysabetwordsmith]

No matter how cheap it is, food that makes people sick or food that people cannot eat is useless.

[fayanora.livejournal.com]

Chocolate, coffee, and now apples? :-(

[zeeth_kyrah]

Chocolate, coffee, apples, grapes (wine), strawberries, wheat, everything kudzu fights for space and nutrients...

There's a LOT of plants which will be adversely affected by climate change.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Pretty sure wine producing grape vines are in a worse position to survive climate change...

Well, if anything gets people doing something about it, the threat of no more coffee, cider and wine ought to.

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith.livejournal.com]

>> Pretty sure wine producing grape vines are in a worse position to survive climate change... <<

Agreed, those are more delicate.

>> Well, if anything gets people doing something about it, the threat of no more coffee, cider and wine ought to. <<

And chocolate, don't forget that.

[rhodielady-47.livejournal.com]

BTW: Those wild apples, Malus sieversii, are available through Cummins Nursery, here in the US. If anyone wants one, I think they still have a few left.
:)