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The Ugly Apple

An apple tree grows in the last place you’d expect to find the Garden of Eden: beside a street in Baltimore City.  The fruit on this tree grows plump, but mottled with spidery black splotches.

I found the ugly apples while on a jog through a park near my neighborhood,  Evergreen.  And so I brought a few of the monsters home as kind of a freak-show curiosity to show my family. I lined them up them on the window sill in our dining room. And for a while, we were afraid to touch them – or even to go over to that side of the room, for fear that – I don’t know, the black plague might ooze out of a wormhole.

But then, I screwed up my courage and plunged a knife into one of the greenish black fruits.

Although the skin was hideous, the flesh was golden.  And so I popped a chunk into my mouth.  The flavor was dense – like the tartness and sweetness of the hundred best apples you’ve ever had, packed into a radioactively tasty little morsel.  I called over my daughters and my wife, and they all raved about the flavor of the monster apple, too.

So we trooped on down to the park, dragging apple-picking equipment we’d dredged from the garage.  Two long-handled crabbing nets.  A rake.  A telescoping aluminum pole, normally used with a paint roller. And duct tape.

My daughters climbed into the tree.  And for about a half hour on a bright clear Sunday morning, we were an impressive work crew, filling four grocery bags with ugly apples.  My wife Liz filled our house with the buttery smells of apple pies and tarts.  I cut up and ate the treasures with dark Mexican beer.

It was then I had my epiphany.  This is what apples must have tasted like in the days before industrial agriculture, back before genetic modification brought us physically attractive but chalky, pulpy supermarket apples.

To test out my theory, I brought one of my apples down to the Waverly Farmer’s Market in Baltimore.  I showed it to the owner of a Pennsylvania orchard, who set me straight.  First of all, he reminded me, even though we say, “As American as Apple Pie,” apples (other than crab apples) are an alien species, brought in by European settlers.  Apple trees were planted across Eastern America in the early 19th century mostly by a single eccentric preacher, Jonathan Chapman, the real Johnny Appleseed.  These early apples produced fruits that were intended mostly for distilling into hard cider – the American beer before Americans met Bud.  Cider apples were not particularly tasty.  Later cross breeding, however, produced more flavorful varieties – like the Japanese Mutsu apple that I had found growing in Baltimore’s Linkwood Park. 

It is true, the sage of Waverly Market informed me, that apples became more generic and bland with the advent of chain supermarkets and refrigerated trucking after World War II.  And yes, the mottled appearance of my apple is actually what all apples would look like without pesticides. The splotches, blotches, and puckers are just marks left by insects – totally harmless, and indeed, natural.  Not an indication that the fruit, under the skin, is unhealthy.  In fact, you could argue that beautiful apples are a sign of poor health – because our modern idea of perfection is achieved through chemical warfare on nature.

The fact that normal-looking apples look so ugly to us that few people would buy them in their true state – or even pick them off a tree in a park -- is more of a statement about what we’ve become than about what apples ever were.

Tom Pelton, a national award-winning environmental journalist, has hosted "The Environment in Focus" since 2007. He also works as director of communications for the Environmental Integrity Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to holding polluters and governments accountable to protect public health. From 1997 until 2008, he was a journalist for The Baltimore Sun, where he was twice named one of the best environmental reporters in America by the Society of Environmental Journalists.