This is a piece written by yours truly after I was inspired by Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire. Please leave me comments on what I can do to improve it!
Oh, the Lord is good to me.
And so I thank the Lord
For giving me the things I need:
The sun and the rain and the apple seed;
The Lord is good to me.
This song is probably best remembered from the Walt Disney short The Legend of Johnny Appleseed. First released as part of the 1948 animated film Melody Time and then again in 2002 in Disney’s American Legends, it tells the sunny tale of young John Chapman, the real man on whom the legend is based. In the story and in real life, Johnny is a scrawny young apple farmer who notices a whole mess of people moving out West to take advantage of all the open space and new opportunities. He despairs, thinking himself unfit and unready for such travels, until an angel appears and scolds Johnny for his lack of faith. The angel, who appears as a frontiersman in a coonskin cap and simple garb, tells him they are sure to need apples out west and that all he truly needs are his bag of apple seeds, a copy of the Bible, and a tin pot to cover his head. The story goes on to tell how the young apple farmer made his way out West, befriending animals and all the while planting his apple seeds.
While this story is laudable as a children’s tale to promote American pride and patriotism, it like most legends is not completely valid. In his book The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World, author Michael Pollan gives a different rendering of the classic tale. The John Chapman of his telling is introduced as a figure lying in a watercraft lazily floating down the Ohio River seemingly without a care in the world, carrying bushel upon bushel of apple seeds he planned to use to plant nurseries up and down the great river. Chapman collected new seeds each year from the apple pomace leftover outside cider mills in western Pennsylvania, which would seem to imply that the apples he planted were not intended for eating, but instead to start more cider mills.
Pollan contends that the reason he knows Chapman wasn’t planting the seeds for the purpose of creating food is found in a simple biological trait of apples: they have high heterozygosity, which means that all apple seeds produce offspring bearing very little genetic relation to their parents. If you cut an apple in half horizontally, you will see five separate chambers each with its own seed or two: each one of these seeds contains the genetic blueprint to create its own unique organism that will only slightly resemble the parent tree. Of the thousands of seeds planted by young Johnny, only a very few would have contained the genetic makeup to create apples that were good to eat, as the fruit produced by the overwhelming majority of seedling apples is almost indescribably sour.
The method farmers use to make certain the apples they grow in their orchards all have the set of desirable characteristics to generate a granny smith or red delicious is based on grafting, a practice Chapman considered inhumane. Discovered by the Chinese in the second millennium BCE, grafting occurs when you bind a piece of wood taken from the tree with desirable fruit onto the trunk of another apple tree. Once this new branch is accepted by the mother tree, all the fruit growing from the new wood and its subsidiary offshoots will match the preferred apple. John Chapman was on record as being vehemently against the grafting of apples, arguing instead that “The correct method is to select good seeds and plant them in good ground and God only can improve the Apple.” So the only logical conclusion that can be reached from these premises is that this explorer was not spreading food, but was in fact spreading alcohol to the West.
So how did the legend of this pioneer who worked to spread American homegrown alcohol across the open country become so warped? In his book Pollan connects this rewriting of the historical record to the rebranding of the fruit that occurred in the early twentieth century. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union had declared war on the apple, and with it the most convenient means of alcohol generation available at the time, causing the growers of apple orchards to have to rethink their sales’ strategy. So they turned to the idea that “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” which coupled with the introduction of Prohibition soon afterwards more than likely caused the folktales of Johnny Appleseed to take a different angle. So, similar to the way in which Saint Nicholas the fourth-century Greek bishop was co-opted as the jolly Saint Nick or Santa Claus to represent the Christian holiday that was trying to replace Yule, John Chapman the man who spread alcohol across America was co-opted to represent healthy eating. What we should take away from this folk story, instead, is Chapman’s idea that grafting apples is unnatural. Apple trees exhibit high rates of heterozygosity, which keeps the plant safe from any widespread blights as the differing genetic makeups mean that different trees are not all affected by the same diseases. By using grafting techniques to the degree we have, humans have engineered it so that most apple trees are genetically identical to many others, which places apples in a precarious position where a handful of strains of diseases could wipe out the vast majority of apple trees that are used to produce fruit.
Sources
Pollan Michael. The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. Random House, 2002
Disney, Walt. The Legend of Johnny Appleseed. Youtube, published March 12, 2012