Bite Into a Unit Study on Apples This Fall

October is National Apple Month, which makes now the perfect time to take a bite out of the history of the fruit that started the Trojan war, bestowed immortality on the Norse gods, and featured in works by artists from Emily Dickinson to Magritte.

• Some sources say that apples originated more than 4,000 years ago in the Middle East in an area called the Caucasus, which is at the border of Europe and Asia, situated between the Black and Caspian Seas, but according to Cornell University’s Albert R. Mann Library, a native apple of Kazakhstan, called Malus sieversii, is the ancestor of today’s apples.

• Contrary to popular belief (and artistic renditions by Durer and Titian), the apple probably isn’t the fruit that got Adam and Eve kicked out of the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis. (Modern scholars blame the pomegranate; Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel points the finger at figs.) The text refers only to “fruit” on the forbidden tree. Apples may have gotten pulled into the mess because of an unfortunate translation error: malus in Latin can mean “apple” or “evil.”

• Apples are heterozygous, which means that if you plant an appleseed, the tree that grows won’t have anything in common with the tree that produced it. In evolutionary terms, this is great — it means that apples are endlessly adaptable and diverse, and it helps explain how a few apple trees brought to the New World could turn into apples grown in every state in the United States. In terms of consistent flavor, however, this potential for variation can leave you with apples “sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream,” as Thoreau famously said. The only way to ensure consistent apples is by grafting — attaching your preferred apple cultivar to a stock plant so that the vascular cambium tissues of the plants grow together.

• John Chapman, of Leominster, Mass., earned the nickname Johnny Appleseed by collecting apple seeds from Pennsylvania cider mills and using them to set up apple nurseries among the settlers in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois. Unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it — Chapman’s seed-grown apples were mostly only good for making an alcoholic version of apple cider, which is why so many of the orchards he started were burned down during the Prohibition movement.

• Of course, the apple may actually end up living up to its tawdry reputation as the fruit of knowledge of good and evil: Bio-artist Joe Davis, part of George Church’s Harvard Medical School lab, is working on a project that would incorporate Wikipedia into the apple genome. He’s using a 4,000-year-old variety of M. sieversii, the world’s oldest apple, to test the theory that binary code based on the four nucleotide bases of DNA will allow information to be stored in DNA. It would take an entire orchard to store all of Wikipedia and eating the apple wouldn’t make you smarter, but it’s still a pretty nifty project.

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