The Botany of Desire (Sweetness)

“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man,” writes
Henry David Thoreau. Much of that history can be coaxed out of John Chapman’s story. It’s the story of how pioneers like him helped to domesticate the frontier by seeding it with Old World plants. Such a strategy would have large consequences on both the frontier and the apple.

In 1801, a land grant in the Northwest Territory specifically required a settler to “set out at least fifty apple or pear trees” as a condition of his deed. The purpose of this rule was to dampen real estate speculation, by encouraging homesteaders to put down roots. Since a standard apple tree normally took ten years to fruit, an orchard was a mark of lasting settlement. This is one reason for the success of Chapman and his trees. Frontiersmen found comfort in an apple orchard, in that it reminded them of the Old World: graceful, flowering trees provided shade and gave the eyes a resting place when scanning across the vast, flat emptiness of the wilderness. It also gave the pioneers a sense of achievement. Conquering the wilderness and domesticating a farm was no easy task. The second reason for Chapman’s success was the apple itself. Sugar was a rare pleasure in the eighteenth century. It usually came in the form of maple sugar, and, in some extremely rare cases, honey. Therefore the sensation of sweetness came chiefly from the flesh of Jonny Chapman’s apple.
Sweetness is a desire that starts on the tongue with a sense of taste, but doesn’t end there. The
experience of sweetness was so special that the word served as kind of a metaphor for perfection. Like a shining equal sign, the word sweetness stood for a human desire: fulfillment. Over time, sweetness has lost much of its power; overuse probably helped to cheapen the word’s power on the tongue. (The final insult came with the invention of synthetic sweeteners.) Anthropologists have found that a taste for sweetness seemed to be universal, even among animals. This makes sense because sugar is the form in which nature stores it’s energy. By encasing their seeds in sugary nutritious flesh, the fruiting plants have found an ingenious way of exploiting the mammalian sweet tooth: in exchange for fructose, the animals provide the seeds with transportation, allowing the plant to expand its range. As an extra precaution for protecting their seeds and ensuring that the seeds get started on their journey, the fruit held off on sweet flesh until the seed is fully developed, by encasing the seeds in bitter, sometimes poisonous flesh. Before then, the fruit is usually green and unpalatable. Desire therefore, is built into the
very nature and purpose of the fruit.
The apple has been quite willing to do business with us humans; we give ourselves far too much
credit in our dealings with other species. Take the oak tree for example. Try as we might, humans have never been able to domesticate the oak tree, yet, evidently, the oak has a satisfactory arrangement with the squirrel, who obligingly forgets where it has buried every fourth acorn (according to Beatrix Potter).
The tree has never had to enter into any formal arrangement with us. The apple has done such a convincing job of making itself at home in America, thanks to Jonny Chapman, that we wrongly assume it is a native. The blandishment of sugar is what got the apple out of Kazakhstan forest, across Europe, to the shores of North America, and into Jonny Chapman’s canoe.

In the process of changing the land, Chapman also changed the apple—or made it possible for the apple to changed itself. If Americans like Chapman planted only grafted trees—if Americans had eaten instead of drunk their apples—the apple would not have been able to remake itself and thereby adapt to its new world. Apples don’t “come true” from seeds, that is, an apple tree grown from a seed will bear a glancing resemblance to its parents. Anyone who wanted edible apples, grafted their apple trees, for apples from seedlings were almost always inedible or sour enough to “set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream” ,Thoreau wrote. Most frontiersmen judged them good for little but hard cider, and hard cider was the fate of most apples grown in America up until Prohibition. Apples were something people drank.
The identification of the apple with notions of health and wholesomeness turns out to be a modern invention, part of a public relations campaign dreamed up by the apple industry in the early 1900s to reposition a fruit that the Women’s Christian Temperance Union had declared war on. “The desire of the Puritan, distant from help and struggling for bare existence, to add Pippen to his slender list of comforts, and the sour ‘syder’ to cheer his heart and liver, must be considered a fortunate circumstance,” a speaker told a meeting of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1885. “Perhaps he is inclined to cider . . . because it was nowhere spoken against in the Scriptures.” Whether this was the reason or a rationale concocted after the fact, Americans were indeed strongly inclined to cider. In fact, there was hardly anything else to drink. The sweetest fruit makes the strongest drink. Corn liquor preceded cider on the frontier by a few years, but after the apple trees began to bear fruit, cider—being safer and easier to make—became the alcoholic drink of choice. Virtually every homestead in America had an orchard from which thousands of gallons of cider was made each year. In rural area cider took the place not only of wine and beer but of coffee and tea, juice, and even water. In many areas, cider was consumed more freely than water, even by children, since it was arguably healthier and more sanitary. Cider became so indispensible to rural life that even those who railed against the evil of alcohol made an exception to cider, and the prohibitionists succeeded in mainly switching drinkers over from grain to apple spirits. Eventually they would attack cider directly and launch their campaign to chop down apple trees, but up until the end of the nineteenth century cider continued to enjoy the theological exemption that the Puritans had contrived for it. One of the wonders of alcohol is that it suffuses the world around. (Or at least spins that illusion.) This was the gift of sweetness John Chapman brought into the country.
Wallace Stevens wrote a poem about the power of a simple jar atop a Tennessee hill to transform the surrounding forest. He described how this very ordinary bit of human pretense “took dominion everywhere”, ordering the “slovenly wilderness” around it like light in the darkness. This serves as a reminder that there can be no civilization without wildness and no sweetness absent its astringent opposite, that our overpowering desire for sweetness drained the innocent apple, warping it of its original taste, shape and purpose. Who’s next in line? The fruit, the animal, or the human?