This article by Ray Spitzenberger first appeared in IMAGES for October 14, 2021, East Bernard Express, East Bernard, Texas.
My youngest daughter in New York said she and her husband were celebrating their wedding anniversary this week by going apple picking. A friend of mine who lives in the Hudson Valley area of New York described the apple harvesting time going on right now as one of her favorite times of the year. Hearing about apple-picking time triggers my memories of the first summer we spent in Mequon, Wisconsin, where we were surrounded by apple orchards. Though we weren’t there during apple-picking time, it was a unique experience to have friends who were apple farmers (if that’s what you call people who grow apples).
It was unique in that I had never known any apple growers before. In Dime Box, two of my uncles attempted to grow apple trees, but neither succeeded. One uncle produced one apple on one surviving tree, and the other uncle’s apple trees died because of a drought that year. While Texas is not an apple-producing state, I am told that folks can and do grow three kinds of apples in the eastern part of Texas, where conditions are more conducive to their growth, the three kinds being Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, and Gala apples. For several reasons, the Gulf Coast is not a good region to plant apple trees.
It’s not surprising that apple harvesting is in full swing in New York right now, since that State is the second largest producer of apples in the U.S. But the largest producer is Washington State, which produces over half of the apples grown in this country, — a whopping 5.4 billion pounds of apples. Michigan and Pennsylvania follow after Washington State and New York in apple production.
We think of apples as a truly “American” thing, as in the old expression, “As American as apple pie!” But neither apples nor apple pie originated in the USA. Apple trees were not native to North America, but were brought to the New World by Europeans, and apple pie was really a British creation, as were a lot of our other American food choices.
While the story of Johnny Appleseed planting the first apple trees all over the American Midwest is mostly legend, some of it is fact. Johnny Appleseed was a real person whose name was John Chapman. He was a rather strange vagabond preacher who encouraged folks, wherever he went, to plant apple trees. He planted his first apple orchard in Pennsylvania in 1774, and there is no doubt he helped others plant many more. After W. D. Haley wrote one of the first stories about Appleseed, over-romanticizing his goodness and kindness in 1871, and Lydia Marie Child wrote a poem about him in 1881, legends began depicting him as a kind of Santa Claus doing good and sowing apple seeds all over the Midwest. Parts of the legends were true, and no doubt John Chapman had a lot to do with starting apple orchards in this country.
Another old saying about apples most of us grew up hearing is this one, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Like apple pie, that old saying didn’t originate in America either. Elizabeth Wright, a Welsh lady coined the phrase in her 1913 book, Rustic Speech and Folklore. But somehow it made its way to America, because we all grew up with it.
Harvard Health says that while an apple a day doesn’t keep the doctor away, it is a healthy choice of food to eat. Some nutrition-conscious folks believe that it may lower cholesterol and blood pressure, that it adds fiber to your diet, aids digestion, helps the immune system, and contains antioxidants. How effective it is in these areas has not been determined as far as I know, but there is no doubt in my mind that apples are healthy eating and have become truly American! And I can’t think of anything more fun than apple picking!
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Ray Spitzenberger is a retired WCJC teacher, a retired LCMS pastor, and author of three books, It Must Be the Noodles, Open Prairies, and Tanka Schoen.