Guess what mango?

What's that?

Well, so I was reading this article in Mother Jones.

It's by Rowan Jacobson.

Oh yeah, I know that byline he writes all those great food articles, like there was that one on a cheese a while back.

I think, yeah, yeah, Well for this article he was writing about apples, We're gonna go with a different food topic, mango apples and apple trees specifically.

And you know, until I read this piece, I had no idea how long an apple tree could live?

Did you know?

I have no idea?

This isn't in your list of facts.

Well, actually, I'm just going to quote him here.

It says, even when abandoned, an apple tree can live more than two hundred years, and like the giving tree in shel Silverstein's book, it will wait patiently for the boy to return.

There is a bent old black Oxford tree and Hollowell, Maine that is approximately two centuries old and still gives a crop of midnight purple apples each fall.

I've actually never heard of midnight purple apples.

We're learning so many things today.

Well, apparently the US used to have thousands of different varieties of apples in the eighteen hundreds and the styles are really astonished.

And since we're getting into fall and apple picking season, we thought it'd be fun to do a list of nine things all about apples.

So let's dig it.

Hey, their podcast listeners, welcome to Part Time Genius.

I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend Mangesh hot Ticketter and sitting behind the soundproof glass trying to stack apples three on top of each other.

How long do you think he's been doing this?

It's been.

I guess that's how tall as smurf is supposed to be.

Three apples, three apples.

Our friend and producer Tristan McNeil always up to something.

What a weirdo, but we love him.

So I'm actually happy you picked apples as a topic because our cute little neighbor Ben, who is the best dressed gentleman on our block.

About Ben Bowl in the podcaster here, I was like, he's not that little or well dressed.

Actually he is well dressed.

But our neighbor brought these like little bag of apples over this morning because he'd gotten apple picking this weekend, and in Georgia, I mean it's late September here, but it is so warm, I don't really think of it as apple picking season, and seeing that was almost my first reminder that it was fall now.

But where do you want to start?

Well, hoy, don't we start with just the varieties of apples.

I know we mentioned just how many there used to be here in the States, And I found this list of eighteen apples with these incredible names that our friend Erica Okrant did for mental flaws, and the names are just so great.

So we've got spartan dog, snout, Winterstein, rusty Coat, cor de bouffe, which is one of my favorites, which means heart of beef, and my favorite American mother.

So those are some tough sounding names and they almost sound like uh punk rock fans or something.

Actually, it's funny you say that, because there is one with an umlot that looks like a hair band.

It's called Ootweiler spot lot.

I think I'm sure I said that right.

And it does not sound appealing the way you say that.

They're right, But you know, docs now isn't like an apple I'm super keen to bite into.

But I am curious, like, in reading all these descriptions, are there any of these rare varietals that you're actually eager to try.

I mean, there was actually something in that row in jacobson piece.

So, like we mentioned, in the mid eighteen hundreds, there were thousands of different types of apples, and as industrial agriculture came to the forefront, apple growers picked a handful of varieties to promote, not often settling on the ones that were the heartiest to transport for obvious reasons, which is.

Why I red delicious are so popular, but you know, not really the most tasty of apples.

Yeah, that's right.

But one of the apples that Jacobson writes about is called the Harrison apple, and as he puts it, quote, it was the pride of Newark, New Jersey, renown in the early eighteen hundreds for making a golden champagne like cider that might have been the finest in the world.

So did we just get rid of it because it didn't transport?

Well no, I mean it was lost for a few decades actually because of prohibition and there was no real reason to keep growing them.

But then in the late nineteen seventies, this apple detective wouldn't this be a great job?

He was an apple detective and he found one old tree in New Jersey.

He grafted it and he started growing them again.

And I haven't tried the champagne sider, but it's definitely on my to do list.

So that's really interesting that they grafted a branch to make that happen.

And I guess that's common for growing fruit.

But one thing I didn't know until you know, we talked about this topic was that you can't actually grow a great apple tree from just planning a seed of any apple.

And this is actually how BuzzFeed puts it.

Quote, if you ate a macintosh apple and planted the seed, the tree it grew would produce apples that looked and tasted nothing like macintoshes.

So instead of planning seeds, growers attach a cutting from the genetically desirable tree onto an existing branch or sapling called a rootstock, so that the grafted bit produces apples genetically identical did those on the tree.

It was cut from.

I mean, obviously I knew a little bit about grafting, but I don't know why it was so surprising to me.

I think just because I had this like romantic old idea of like Johnny Apple seeds, scattering seeds, and these beautiful tasty apples growing from them.

But you know that's almost never how you get great apples.

You know, One thing I realized as I was reading up on this was how little I knew about apple production.

Like farmers at apple orchards actually rent thousands of bees and hives from beekeepers each season just to pollinate their trees.

Did you know this?

I did not realize there was a rental market for bees.

Yeah, but a good one.

I know.

In New York, some of our neighbors used to rent a cat to come to their place just to run around and lead the scent to keep away mice, which is equally weird to me.

Weird and now scary.

All of a sudden, you get one more place to be scared of.

Well, yeah, so what happens is you rent bees for a couple of weeks and then the beekeeper comes back and takes the hive to another orchard.

At least I think that's how it works.

But I was reading about this Georgia farmer who was saying he doesn't need to rent bees because there are just so many types around, just naturally.

And this was from a story reported on by Wabe.

But the scientist from a local college came by and he referred to this one orchard as the bee Eden, and so here's his quote about it.

The first time I came here during bloom was eye opening for me.

It looked like almost the entire orchard was kind of on fire, was smoking like this black mist.

Get up in there and you actually realize it's not smoke.

It's just thousands and thousands and thousands of bees and they're all native.

So what's crazy is that he found more than one hundred and fifty species of bees at this.

One apple orchard of crazy.

Yeah, including a type of bee that mines under the trees and has an underground city in the dirt.

Yeah, that's amazing.

Well, I have one last apple growing factor and then we can talk about other things.

But apparently Japan created some of the largest and most beautiful apples in the world.

And if you've read about the giant single package strawberries they give for Valentine's Day, or like the square watermelon they produce, you know that the culture around cultivating this beautiful produce is very real, and apples are no exception.

So I found this article on the University of Cincinnati magazine from this professor who was writing about her experience in Japan.

And apparently farmers will climb ladders and pluck the four outer blooms on an apple, leaving only the center one because it creates an apple that's thirty percent larger than the standard American apple.

And this is all done by hand.

And then early in the season, when the apples are still just an inch big, they actually discard all the imperfect ones, like they know at that young like that they're not going to be beautiful, yeah, And then they take all the promising ones and they put these special wax paper bags on them.

And not only does this paper bag system keep out the pest, but it supposedly extends the like storage life and the flavor of the fruits.

And then they also put different wax colored paper on because it triggers the color jeans of the apples, and it's kind of crazy.

They leave on to work.

They leave them on for ten to fourteen days, and then they remove the bags, and then they give the apples pure sunlight because that's what gives them sweetness.

But to make sure the apples get even sweetness everywhere, they actually rotate the apples on the on the branches by hand.

They rotate them on the brand that they wouldn't be pulled off by doing that.

No, they carefully rotate them.

They take away any leaves that are causing shades.

They even put these like white reflective mats underneath so that the bottom of the apples get a perfect tan.

It's crazy.

And then for the biggest apples, which are obviously going to be sold as gifts, they put on these stickers to create tattoos on the apples that say things like best wishes for a long life or or this one Japanese pop star put images of his face on it to.

Get out to fans.

It's just kind of amazing.

But the professor ended the article by saying, quote, this intensive work results in apples that are absolutely beautiful and flawless.

Our apples look scruffy in comparison.

Yeah, I mean it so much work.

All right, So we've done about five facts.

Now I think, what do you say?

We reel off some quick ones about apples you don't want to hear more about Japanese apple com That was pretty interesting.

So here's what I found about the nineteen oh four Olympic marathon race and a truly bad apple.

And of course reading about the old Olympics reminds you of just how different the competition was back then.

Like in nineteen oh four, Felix Carbajal ran the race in cutoff trousers and a beret for some reason.

And according to Smithsonian, he saw someone eating peaches along the way and snatched one or two and ate them.

But he was still hungry for fruit, so he stopped in an orchard along the way and ate a bunch of apples, and then a few miles later he realized they were bad apples and he got the stomach cramp, so he laid down, took a nap, and when he woke up, he kept running.

He was a butterfly.

I thought you were telling the story of like that's kind of what He was still hungry.

Then he took a nap, but he took a nap, started running again, and he finished in fourth place.

Wow, in his fancy shorts.

That's pretty great.

Yeah, oh, that's pretty incredible.

All right.

Well, here's something I hadn't heard before.

It It comes from the New York Times, and they were actually talking to this curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and discussing how artists spends so many hours just trying to represent a real fruit on canvas, you know, trying to get the color and the shape just completely accurate.

Now partially because they're inspired by Seyson.

But what's funny is that Sezon was a very slow painter.

And as he puts it, he says that Seisan used artificial fruit partially because he didn't want it rotting in the time that he was trying to capture.

I doubt that that's really true, but it gives you an idea of just how slow you was.

That is interesting.

Well, kind of like how Audubon used to paint birds by killing them and fixing them the wires on branches and like that.

It's so grim, But we've got two more apple facts to go, so let's get to those right after a break.

So have I told you that Ruby is obsessed with making fruit salads and just forcing them on people lately?

You have not, although given her weird obsessions, this doesn't Yeah.

So I walked in the house the other day and she said, who things, I make a great fruit salad.

Raise your hand, dad, wis in your hand?

Raised you gotta be honest with that's pretty good.

Now, are they any good?

I mean, it's surprising how good it is for a five year old to me at least.

But she's so cocky about it.

Like we went to this Korean restaurant last week and she looked at the food that came out and then she just kind of like turned to the waiter and said, I make a great fruit salad.

If you want, I can come back and show you how, Like it's a secret or something.

It's so ridiculous.

Pretty great, all right, So we're talking apples and the pressure is on.

I'd love this talk about Ruby.

In fact, I think her obsessions deserve a night at some point.

But what's your last factor of the day?

Mango?

Maybe Why New York is called a big Apple?

Oh yeah, a good one.

So New York City does produce a lot of apples, but according to history dot com, the nickname doesn't have to do with the fruit production.

Apparently the name comes from this newspaper writer in the twenties who overheard these New Orleans stable hens talking about traveling to these big races in New York and they called it the Big Apple because it was considered this like big time venue.

But he liked it so much he just kept using it, and it caught on with jazz musicians in the thirties.

But apparently the city she forgot the name for about forty years, and then it was revived in the seventies for a tourism campaign and that's when it really stuck.

But you know, what's interesting to me is that New York hasn't always been partial to apples.

In the sixteen hundreds, the Dutch actually called the city New Orange for a brief period in honor of William of Orange.

Oh wow, all right, Well, I'm going to end this one on Isaac Newton.

It just felt like the right thing to do in a story I found on him from our friends at Nita Rama.

So everybody's heard the legend that Newton quote discovered gravity when an apple fell on his head, And well, the story isn't exactly true.

There was an apple involved in the discovery.

Apparently Newton wrote about it himself and describe witnessing this falling apple while staring out of a window at his house in Woolsthorpe, Manor.

Now what's interesting, though, is that there are a number of places that claim they have the tree, and one place called the King's School says that they paid to uproot the tree and put it in their headmaster's garden.

Meanwhile, Trinity College and Cambridge claims that they have the lone descendant of the original old tree outside the room where Newton studied.

What's funny is that they all get pretty specific about the tree too.

So here's how Nitaama explains it.

That the apple is a green cooking apple called the flower of Kent, and it's this pear shaped, mealy and actually generally unappetizing apple that changed the course of signs.

I like that we're giving this pear shaped, mediocre apple some glorious I do think you have to get the prize for this.

Well, thanks so much.

And if you look, actually he has stacked four apples.

He's just showing off over there.

Tristan.

That's right, well them, Tristan, mango and meat.

Thanks so much for listening.

Thanks again for listening.

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