November 21, 2007

Stalking the Placid Apple’s Untamed Kin

I HAD the fruit tasting of a lifetime here last month. It went on for 12 hours over two days. By the end I had sampled several hundred different kinds of apples, some like no apple I’d ever tasted before. At least eight varieties tasted hauntingly of roses. Several surprised me with the distinct taste of anise or fennel. There were aromas of all kinds. Flowers and spices and nuts, including coconut. Lots of other fruits: orange peel and lemon, strawberry, pineapple, green banana. Rhubarb. Occasionally, popcorn, and potatoes. Some apples seemed to suffer from confused genus identity and tasted like pears.

It was exhilarating to experience such different flavors in apples brought here from all over the world. It was also frustrating, because I might not ever be able to experience them again. The United States was once home to more than 10,000 named apple varieties, but nowadays it’s hard to find more than a handful, even at farmers’ markets.

The best place to get an idea of the apple’s diversity is here in the Finger Lakes region, an hour northwest of Ithaca, at the United States Department of Agriculture’s Plant Genetic Resources Unit, home to the world’s most extensive collection of apple varieties and relatives. Some plant collections consist only of seeds, but apples don’t breed true — their seeds don’t duplicate the genetic makeup of the tree that bears them. So the apple collection has always included both seeds, for a broad base of genetic information, and also a living orchard of known varieties. Today, the trees are supplemented by cuttings that are cryogenically preserved at 300 degrees below zero.

The apple collection here was largely assembled by Philip L. Forsline, a horticulturalist with the Department of Agriculture. During the 1990s, he took part in several expeditions to central Asia, the home of the domestic apple’s wild parent species and its relatives. He brought back to Geneva a total of 140,000 seeds and 900 live cuttings from those wild parent species. Mr. Forsline recalled traveling to the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan and marveling at forests consisting almost entirely of wild fruit and nut trees, with 300-year-old apple trees 5 feet across at the base and 60 feet tall. “There were apples of all sizes and colors. Some were so pale that they looked like snowballs hanging on the trees,” he said.

In Geneva, we had visited the nearby laboratory of Susan K. Brown, a horticulturalist at Cornell University, to sample some of the experimental breeds she is developing. Progress is slow, she said. “It takes four years to taste the results of a particular cross and find out whether you’ve got something weird or bland or good, so we’re working on methods to make our breeding more systematic and precise, and evaluate fruit quality earlier.” Dr. Brown volunteered that not all the flavors generated in her breeding program have been appealing. “We’ve gotten some strange aromas, things like soap, tin cans, cat urine, solvents,” she said.

Fruits that people like are the exception. Nearly all wild ancestors of our table fruits are small, sour and astringent. And yet Mr. Forsline said that when he was scouting wild apples in the forests of central Asia, “maybe 1 or 2 percent were fruits that I’d be happy to eat.” For the small and sour ones, Dr. Brown suggested an unexpected opportunity. “A few years ago, as a joke, I put little sour crab apples into my kids’ lunch boxes,” she said. “When they came home they asked for more — they and their friends had loved them! And I realized that the crabs were like those super-sour candies that appeal to kids. That might be one way to get children to eat more fresh fruits.”