Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Apples

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why apples are secretly incredibly fascinating. Special guests: Dan McCoy and Stuart Wellington.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Apples. Known for being red. Famous for being yellow or green also. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why apples are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alec Schmidt, and I'm very much not alone. I'm joined by my co-host, Katie Golden. Katie, hi. Hello.

Hi, that's me. She kept it very brief because we are joined by wonderful guests we want to talk to, too. You know them from many things, such as our pals at Maximum Fun, The Flophouse. Please welcome Dan McCoy and Stuart Wellington. Hey, guys. How's it going? Hey, it's going good. Thanks for having us.

It's going well. I was just fact-checking in my head. I'm like, do people know us for many things or mostly just that one thing that you mentioned? I mean, it depends on who the person is. Yeah. Like your parents know you from being their kid. Her husband. Yeah, that's true. There are various people specifically out there who may know us in other functions. I'm primarily a philosopher, so I try to be as universal and global with statements as I can, right? Like, what about parents? What about the Lord above, right? There's so many ways. Do we even know that other people are conscious? Great question.

There's no way of proving it. They're all NPCs, if you ask me. Nice. Yeah, that's a healthy outlook. They exist to give me stuff. It's very, I see the world as incredibly transactional. But that's a topic for a different podcast.

Stuart, these people don't know you. Stop poisoning the well. Stop doing bits. This is a purely serious podcast. There's no bits allowed. Okay. Well, and Dan or Stuart, why don't you go first? But we always start with folks' relationship to the topic or opinion of it.

This topic was selected by Chris on the Discord with support from lots of other folks. Thank you all. But how do you all feel feel about apples the topic today so despite being perhaps the kind of number one fruit that i think people would be like think of a fruit like like there's so much oh yeah stuff with an apple you know certainly western people i think it might be a little different in other countries certainly Dan. We think globally around here. But like the sort of traditional image of the Garden of Eden apple, the Sir Isaac Newton apple, the shooting an arrow off of someone's head apple,

William Tell, the Johnny Appleseed. Didn't Odin trade an apple for knowledge? I don't know whether you're lying or not. I don't know that. It's more bits. I'm just doing bits. Okay. I would say my relationship to apples is, as a fruit, I would say...

Well, I mean, you can just jump in. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You stopped talking for a second. That gave me an opportunity to jump in. No, my point was, I think that despite being like sort of the er fruit for a lot of people, it is one of my least favorite fruits to eat. It's fine in a

pastry sometimes, but even there I would like other things better. Dan is a baker, everybody, just to let everyone know. Now, Stuart, I'm sorry. You, please. Thank you for apologizing to me for when I interrupted you. I would say as a fruit, I would say it's a mid-tier fruit.

And as a system of measurement, I think it is inaccurate. You're talking about Smurfs. Yes. What is there? There are a certain number of apples. There are what, three apples tall? Three apples high, yeah. That's wild.

I mean, I've seen Smurfs compared to Gargamel. How big are the apples? Maybe they're crab apples? Maybe. When you said measurement, I thought it was going to be some kind of word problem about bushels of apples. Like, Tom has three bushels of apple, and then we're into math class. Or comparing them to what inches. And let's see.

As apple-bottom genes, I'm a fan. Ooh, okay. Follow-up question. Boots with the fur? Oh a fan. Ooh, okay. Follow-up question, boots with the fur? Oh, yeah, thumbs up. The whole club would be looking at me. Yeah. Katie, how about you? How do you feel about apples?

All I can think of now is Liz Truss's speech about apples she gave, where she spent roughly 20 minutes of air time talking about how sad it was that there weren't enough british apples um yeah these these apples of of of newton isaac newton and british apples and then and then it was over it was over for her that was it she spent her entire prime ministership being sad about apples now Now, was this like thinly veiled xenophobia? Yes. Is that the point of it? Yes, it was.

Yeah. Now, have apples consistently been a, like, synonymous with that kind of thing? What kind of thing? I don't know. Xenophobia. Xenophobia. Maybe. To me, they're synonymous with mealiness.

And I realize that that's mostly because when I was a kid, I think it was the heyday of the Red Delicious, which was designed to look like the perfect apple. Charitably named. Sorry. I remember we're not supposed to swear. You can bleep. We won't get way into it. But yeah, the Red Delicious story, it turns out,

they were sort of red and yellow striped apples, and then they bred them to look like a cartoon red apple that, to me, tastes much worse. Yeah. So that makes sense. It's like water and sand that's roughly apple-shaped. I have very strong opinions about apples in terms of flavor. I'm sure we're going to get into that, Alex. But yeah, I definitely have like a favorite apple type. And I don't want to spoil it in case we're going to talk about the best apple in the world. Let's go around.

What's everybody's favorite? We got favorite apples. Okay. So mine is Sweet Tango. Okay. But the name of the apple is a little bizarre yeah it's a new one people just making up apples around here i can't recall which one's the best but i remember having fond feelings about a fuji a pink lady uh some macintoshes i think are good but uh now we're talking about ladies yeah I don't understand or tasty ladies uh my I honestly I have no like I think I kind of think all apples taste the same

uh but my wife really likes honey crisp and she will eat honey crisp apples exclusively if I bring the wrong kind home she knows it immediately and is mad at me well because she's correct they don't all think yeah yeah i think it is definitely partly psychological my favorite is fuji but i think it's because i think about a beautiful mountain in japan and then i also like braeburn but i think about it being from new zealand which and like the lord of the rings aerial shots of new zealand you know it's just all like travel documentary reasons are why I like various apples. That's fair.

You can imagine you're eating Mount Fuji. Yeah, around the world and 80 apples. I get it. And so I a little bit picked you guys because the bonus show is all about Johnny Appleseed, which will have a movie element. But also you're in New York City. Ah, the nickname of New York City, the Big Apple. Thrilling. Great. Even though none of us call it that day-to-day ever, living here.

What? Is this a... Will you get into it? I'm not sure how this nickname came about. Yeah, I wanted to find out, so we looked into it, and that's the first thing. Oh, I wanted to find out. So we looked into it and that's the first thing. Oh, great.

Ask and answered. Is it a big apple? Yeah, if you dig deep enough under the subway so you find apple meat. I call it the giant peach in honor of that peach that fell in the middle of the city and

had all those bugs in it. Yes. Yep. That would be appropriate. Yeah. Had all those bugs in it. And a kid. I have a visceral memory of that movie of peach juice just viscously landing on people in New York.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. That was just their life. Yeah. The city was sticky for months afterwards. So many ants. When that nickname originates one of many stats and numbers this week, on every episode, that's our first fascinating thing,

a quick set of fascinating stats and numbers. This week, that's in a segment called Do the Statsio. Swing your arms from side to side. Come on. It's time to go do the Stetsio. Swing your arms from side to side. Come on, it's time to go do the Stetsio. He does this every week. I've heard some episodes. I enjoy it.

You can't stop him. You can't beg with him. So on our podcast, there's occasional made-up songs that take, I don't know, 20 minutes. And that was nice and short. So that was great. I love it. I mean, I also often wander around the apartment, my apartment, singing the Mario theme song. But, you know, using the Super Mario Super Show lyrics where it's like, take one step.

And then again, let's do the Mario all together. Yeah, which is what he was kind of doing, right? Yeah. Why don't you ever do that for karaoke, by the way? I keep looking for it. They don't have it for some reason. Yeah, I was going to say, I feel like that would not surprise me.

You just bring your own machine to the bar. They're like, oh, wow, this guy is ready. Yeah, that suggestion was from Ballsinferno on the Discord. Thank you, Ballsinferno. And we have a new name for this segment every week. Please make a Massillion Wacking as possible. Submit through Discord or to Sifpod at gmail.com. The first number this week is 1924, because that's the approximate year when writer John J. Fitzgerald

popularized the nickname The Big Apple for New York City. 1924. John J. Fitzgerald is a very 1924 name. Yeah. He probably wore knickers, I'm imagining. Knickers or something. Probably has some messed up politics. Probably a wee bit racist.

So his main thing, it turns out, he was a sports writer, and specifically for horse racing. Well, I know horses like big apples, for sure. Yeah. Is there clarity on why he picked an apple, or is it just a thing that he said? Was Fitzgerald a horse? Mm-hmm. It seems like it was legitimately because he was around horses a lot and they like apples was part of it.

But the origin is he used this phrase, the Big Apple, as a slang term for the biggest horse race and for the race where the most money can be won. And then in a column in 1924, he just expanded the metaphor to which U.S. cities are important. And he wrote that, quote, there's only one big apple. That's New York. So it was a weird horse racing writer gave it to the city.

That's also where Chicago got its nickname, the mid-sized plum. I do like that. It's just because he spent so much time around horses. He kind of just absorbed horse culture and all he could talk about was apples, you know, called his wife. Oh, my little sugar cube. It's like, please, he's spending too much time with the horses. Nay. Nay, I'm not horses nay nay i'm not nay i'm not yeah and the the source there is the book apple a global history by journalist and radio producer erica janek but she says that from there the nickname caught on especially because of a

1970s new york City tourism campaign where they explicitly called it the Big Apple in marketing and promo and stuff. Was it one of those things where like people are trying to do like a retro thing? It's like when a bar is like, I want to name myself after, I don't know, Henry Hudson's ship, Half Moon or some crap like that sort of thing. They're like, oh, yeah, yeah. This hipster just came in and is trying to like Rename the city but it was

Said back in the 20s so it actually makes sense I sort of figured that if it was in the 70s They just didn't want to be like The big Sort of pool Of prostitution And sex shows 70s New York was so much better

Right The big central square that's just pornography Theaters and sex shows. 70s New York was so much better. Right. The big central square that's just pornography theaters. No, that doesn't work. Okay, okay. The big police person just punched you in the face. Yeah. Still true. Yeah,

to think that one day that square of sex shows would just all be M&M's stores and whatnot. It's wild. So still sex shows. Still sexy. Still sexy. That green one, am I right?

Not if the wokes change it, right? Oh, no. Yeah, I know. Trying to take our sexy M&M's away. The wokes are making it hard for me to visualize having sex with an M&M and I am upset you could put the green M&M

in a diving bell and I would still be down she's just got that kind of energy I was trying to picture a diving bell. I got there. Yeah, yeah. I'll pull it up on my phone. Yeah.

I brought up the 1920s. It primed us to think diving bells. Yeah. Perambulators, et cetera. Yeah. Next number here, very simple. It is two because apples are the second most popular fruit in the united states by consumption apparently americans eat about 17 pounds of apples per year on average can we guess

the number one is that yeah go ahead yeah is it bananas it is good guess yeah bananas yeah that's that is bananas wait a minute how many pounds of apples do I eat a year? 17. 17, apparently. Well, that's what it said on average. But that's what he said on average. And I'm like, I feel like I'm throwing those numbers off because I don't eat that many apples. Yeah.

So that must be like, that might mean somebody's eating 34 pounds of apples. And Elliot, our third Flophouse house host is really throwing it off by his famed hatred of all fruits yeah he doesn't want yeah i mean he he eats he eats like somebody whose parents are away for the weekend and he's tricked the babysitter or something it is i feel like fruit was definitely more of a dessert to most people before good candy came along. Once really sugared up industrial candy came, it was like, what is fruit? I guess it's just this mealy stuff I could have. Forget it. Can I say on this topic, we signed up for imperfect food deliveries during the pandemic.

This is not an ad, by the way. Not an ad. When it was like, how do we get food you know like what what can we do like all the like delivery slots are gone like people were panicking about things and and we we stuck with it uh just because it was uh convenient and then we were away for a long time and we like have moved near better grocery stores and we weren't getting it. And today I realized like we are getting a delivery we didn't want and it has a bunch of apples in it. And I'm like, I'm already like strategizing. I'm like, I guess I could make like an apple galette

because I don't want to eat them in an unadulterated form. I need to, as you say, like candy them up a little bit. Turn them into an acceptable dessert. I think it would be impressive, though, to line up those apples and then just solemnly eat them all. Quietly. Like, Dan, what's for dinner? Apples. Very stern.

No further explanation. Yeah. As my wife and I stare into one another's eyes saying nothing. Just spite eating apples. You know, this next chunk of the show is going to feel fun on the heels of that. Because the next number here, it leads into a takeaway within the numbers. The next number is $13.2 billion U.S. Billion with a B, $13.2 billion. Oh man, what could that be? That is a high-end estimate

for the value of wasted food in the U.S. due to Americans not eating the cores of apples. Huh. It turns out takeaway number one, the cores of apples. Huh. It turns out, takeaway number one, you can go ahead and eat all of an apple. You can just do that. But what if you're not supposed to eat a lot of this? The seeds will grow in your tummy. Well, I mean, the seeds have arsenic in them, but I mean, not at a level that is going to

cause any trouble to you if you're just eating an apple, but aren't they poisonous? Yeah, it's cyanideide a tiny bit amount of cyanide cyanide yeah i guess arsenic would probably be stronger it would be bad if you're sort of a if you're like a spy from a country that doesn't have a big budget it's like well i got caught they got a big bag of apples i I've just got to eat 50 apples now. I feel like there's like a MacGyver episode or something where he's like, how do I get out of this gym? How do I poison this guy?

We just don't think of apple cores as edible. And you don't have to eat them. Well, thank you. Sounds like you're saying we should. Because we're wasting money. Yeah. Like from a food waste, food supply chain perspective, we probably should eat entire apples like stem and seeds and all because it turns out you can. But Alex, they're yucky.

Yeah, that's actually a good point. Well, the trick is and I I went and tested this before we taped too the trick is you want to eat your apple from the top or from the bottom because like the core is really there but it's not that thick and it's it doesn't taste that different from the rest of the flesh of the apple and so if you eat from especially the bottom you're like spreading the core across your bites in a way where it helps. Now, what about the very bottom and very top where there's like, there's a little like star

of vegetable matter and then there's the stem? I mean, you can eat it. Yeah, I ate that star and I thought it would be weirder. The stem was like tough. I ended up just throwing out the stem. But biologically, you can eat it. There's nothing wrong with it. Yeah.

You can do a lot of things biologically. Not all of them are good. You can eat paper. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. We waste so much money not eating paper. The flesh of the apple is apparently biologically an extension of the

stem it's called the hypanthium and so it's all kind of the same to your body the one thing you can't do is eat so many apple seeds that you give yourself cyanide poisoning don't do that npr has the math of it and apparently apple seeds contain something called amygdalin, and when we digest it, the amygdalin can release a little bit of cyanide. But if you're an adult human weighing 132 pounds, you would need to eat at least 25 apples worth of seeds to feel any impact. What if I weigh significantly more than 132 pounds? Oh, to be that adult human.

Then you can have even more apples. Yay! Mush it up. Perfect. Throw it in a blender. I do eat a lot of fruit in my smoothies, along with protein powder and whatnot. And

yeah, I feel like smoothified fruit is uh is a big thing for me this is the part in the podcast where we mentioned that stewart is jacked oh yeah i'm super jacked heck yeah um it's all that apple muscle it's all that apple muscle although i don't usually put apples in my smoothies i tried an apple smoothie once, but I also failed to put any ice in it, so it was sort of just smushed apple and no sugar. It was,

you know, not good. Yeah, more of an apple sauce. Speaking of drinking apples, my wife, my wife who's also a bartender, my wife who's also a bartender, my wife is also a bartender. She had a friend of hers come in and visit her at the bar. And he's a guy who does not drink.

He's not much of a drinker, but he came in one afternoon and he sat down at the bar, obviously exhausted. And she's like, what's up? And he's like, oh, I just came from my ex-wife's father's funeral or something like that. And he was he was like emotionally wiped out. He's like, I need a drink. She's like that. And he was like, emotionally wiped out. He's like, I need a drink. She's like, oh, okay. He's like, what do you want? He goes, I'll have a martini.

And she's like, do you have any preference? He's like, apple. Like, no, no, my friend, that's a different thing. And that's my favorite way to order a martini is I'll have a martini, apple. Martini. Apple. Martini. Apple. Like it's a shot in a brew.

It's very good. That's very good. Yeah. Yeah. I knew a woman who was working a brunch service and this table in Park Slope, of course, just to paint a full picture. And after this table placed their order, this woman just held out an orange. And the server's like, what's this's this she goes for my mimosa so i like the idea of somebody's own orange so like showing up to a bar and being like hey uh bartender can you make me a martini and holds out an apple

could you put a little bit of this in there. Is this a pickup artist technique? Yeah, yeah. I pull it on my oversized hat. I know there's peacocking. Is this something like hamstering where you like pull out food from your cheeks? It's like

I do like to call it hamstering. Hamsters are cute. That's why we use that term what uh and i'm gonna link a video the the recent person on the internet to popularize it was eli a ruff of foodbeast.com but they made a video of how to best eat an entire apple from the bottom and i did it and it was weirdly normal feeling like the one weird thing was that i felt like i should be done about two-thirds of the way through because i'm used to eating less apple i was like how is there more apple left this is crazy it's kind of like the opposite of an unboxing video yeah just a guy eating the whole apple. But you can do it. And the next number here is five, because five is the general number of seed pockets in most apples.

It turns out, like, when you're cutting up an apple, opening one up, they have five seed pockets, which are technically called carpels. And each of those can have seeds or not. It depends how the apple grew. And each of those can have seeds or not. It depends how the apple grew. But it's a set of five evenly spaced things, which brings us to another mini takeaway number two. Apples are sort of kind of pentagrams. Nice.

Dan and Stu don't know this, but the episode before this one is about pentagrams, just the whole subject. And it turns out apples, especially if you cut it through the middle horizontally, you'll see a pentagram shape in there. And pentagrams are an ancient mystical symbol across many cultures that has helped create a lot of apple myths. That like secret pentagram inside an apple. Maybe that's why they're so popular among witches witches heavy metal dudes yeah yeah that's kind of part of it yeah and their apples yeah dudes yeah like how metallica's always up there eating apples yep well and the the pentagram symbol it also might be part of why apples became a candidate for the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the Bible. Because people said, oh, there's this mystical symbol in here.

Maybe that is one reason this could be the fruit they ate in the Garden of Eden and the tree of knowledge. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, so it's like if you eat a pentagram then you have to wear clothes is that sort of the i'm not i'm not a bible scholar no bibologist that's most of the book that idea yeah yeah that's it yeah i also hope that it wasn't an apple you know because it isn't specified it just became an apple right yeah i just hope it was a better fruit. Like, if they're going to be cursed. What should it have been?

Just an apple. Give me a fruit replacement. Like a mango? I mean, mangoes are so hot right now. They are the naughtiest fruit. One of the hardest to cut up for this guy. Because Dan's right. The Bible is not specific. The original Hebrew, they just say it was a fruit.

And apparently, and especially Eastern Christian churches, they depict it as a fig. A fig is the big competitor, partly because that would grow better in the Middle East. And also because a lot of paintings show them, like after they eat it, they do say, oh, I want to cover myself. I want some kind of clothes.

The leaves of a fig tree are a better fit for that purpose than apple leaves. Yeah. Right. I thought it was because the leaves of a fig tree roughly could cover the male genitalia with how the fig leaf is shaped. Just like, you know, ooh. Yeah. I've got to look up this leaf. Yeah.

I'm going to have to look up male genitalia. Is there anywhere in the internet I can find pictures? I've been looking for something to wear. I'm just saying, it has like, you know, I don't want to go into detail, but sort of the outline. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow, cool. Okay, so we learned something today.

The next number here, it's another year. It is 1666 because 1666 is when Isaac Newton started telling people this story of an apple falling from a tree and inspiring his insights about gravity. And this myth is weird because I thought it was just totally made up, but it turns out Newton personally told people that this happened. So it might be exaggerated. It might not have hit him in the head, but he was out there like promoting this idea. I like that because it turns him into like the original kind of Bill Nye the science

guy where he's like, look look i'm surrounded by a bunch of idiots who don't understand gravity i gotta put this in a way you understand yeah yeah like uh isaac newton's just standing in front of a brick wall and he's like has anybody ever been standing under an apple tree and an apple fall right on their head, bonk! And the next number here, another year, 1976. Because that's the year when Steve Jobs picked the name Apple for him and his partner's computer company. And it turns out the first Apple logo was a super intricate, woodcut-type drawing of Isaac Newton under an apple tree.

It was like a whole, almost like you'd find in an old book. Yeah, it looked like a Gustav Dore print or something. Yeah. But then the following year, they hired designer Rob Janoff to do something else, and he went with the almost biblical Apple logo that we have today. So conceptually, was the idea that this is going to be as big a shift as as like that as gravity as uh yeah was that like is there any thinking behind why they picked apple or is it just apple or were they just looking at a beatles album and saw their apple logo and i'll just do that

but different yeah that's a grange smith i think yeah do you think they're like uh he was like our our computers you can drop them out of a tree and they'll still be okay so that's why yeah they i think they were going for we are this brilliant and this focused on innovation uh and yeah they also they picked it after apple core the beatles holding company and apple records the music label existed so then there was a bunch of litigation for decades between the two huh big fight now you know stew yeah and luckily uh luckily apple computers won and they exist and uh they make a bunch of money. Hooray. And then they got sued by that little worm from Richard's Scary Cartoon.

He drives a little apple. That's his car. That's his car. Did he invent that car? Is that why he's able to see them? He's the only one I see driving it. I imagine he's sort of the Elon Musk of the Richard's Scary world. Oh, cool.

So a real jerk. Yeah, yeah. I only want bad things for him then. Hates his children. Well, and one last number in the stats and numbers. It is five cents because that was the new sale price for apples during the Great Depression in the 1930s U.S. The apples were selling for about five cents early in the depression was that ridiculously expensive yeah was that like 12

dollars an apple that was cheap yeah it was a low price oh yeah it was a low price okay well okay hold on then then all old people have been lying to us because i feel like you know they always talk about in the old days. Oh, you know, five cents for a picture show, you know, and you're telling me that a picture show and an apple are going to be priced the same. Come on, Stu. Yeah. Come on, Stuart. That was before factory farms, though, Dan.

So it's probably harder to get apples. You'd have to, like, go and find them on the ground or find a worm driving one around. But apples do loom large in my conception of the Great Depression. I just imagine people with little cigarette boxes. Not like the cigarette girl style. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Boxes full of apples?

Yeah. It's like that book. it's like that book it's like that book the apple grapes of wrath yep and yeah the short answer is it was just harder to get apples back then we didn't have factory farming but the the short answer for why we think of it is that there was basically a brief multi-level marketing scheme for apples in 1930. What happens is 1929... Like a tulip fever thing where like in the Netherlands where the price of tulips went up because of speculators and whatnot or... It was almost the reverse.

speculators and whatnot? It was almost the reverse. What happened is fall of 1929, there happened to be a huge apple bumper crop, in particular from new orchards in Washington state. And then also fall of 1929, the economy collapses. And what happens is the apple industry starts making like a package offer to unemployed Americans where they could buy a box of apples at a discount, resell them and then pay something back to the apple growers. So there was like a very specific commercial deal being offered to people and thousands of people took them up on it. Apparently there were 6,000 apple sellers in New York City at one point every day. And like they crowded each other and slowed traffic and the trash system was full of Apple cores. And so this raised the price of

apples a bunch, but then crashed it down to five cents. And so there was a wave of Apple sellers right in 1930, but then they all stopped taking this deal because they crowded each other out. And that left behind this mental picture of the depression is full of Apple sellers specifically. That's amazing. All right. This is secretly incredibly fascinating. We said the title. Yeah.

Airhorns, airhorns. But yeah, apparently Apple sellers were almost panhandlers. University of Wisconsin historian Stanley Schultz says selling apples was also sort of a way to just respectably present yourself as begging for money. And so occasionally somebody doing well would like buy one apple for 50 cents to mainly donate to the person. So that was also kind of a low key begging that was going on.

Yeah. I wonder if there was like a Fagin-esque character organizing all the apple sellers, trying to rake in the big bucks. The apple full dodger. Yep. Oh, I'm so full of apples. I can't pick any pockets. My tummy hurts.

I had too many apples. I ate the whole thing. Bottom is dim. Right. But yeah, those are a couple takeaways on all our stats and numbers. We are going to take a short break, then come back with a couple more takeaways about a battle for the origin of apples. Ooh. Did a lot of people die?

Mm-hmm. No. Armies of elves and orcs. Folks, as you know, supporters of SIF directly through MaximumFun.org. MaximumFun.org slash join is the link to become one. Those supporters are the only reason this podcast exists. It's an employee-owned company. These are artist-owned podcasts. We depend on listeners caring about that and thinking that's awesome for any of this to happen. If you could possibly join in that effort, that would be incredible. I hesitate to say incredible because it's part of the name of

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And we're back and we're diving into takeaway number three. Apples come from Kazakhstan, the country of Kazakhstan in Asia. That is where all apples originated and descended from. The OG apple prime. Yeah. Mm hmm. Is this like part of the mythology of apples? Is this like is this is this apples religious belief?

Is that they all come from Kazakhstan? Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan, sorry. I think, no, they're like, what, this is literally the fertile crescent for apples, as you're saying. This is the apple ground zero. Did we genetically test the apples and look at apple DNA and compare it to apple residue found in a mummy's stomach or something? You claim that you're of Irish descent, but here it says you are 23% crab apple, actually. Yeah, they checked DNA and to this day it is the center of apple biodiversity

wow there's a location in the tianshan mountains of eastern kazakhstan near china can i go can i go on like uh like an excursion or some kind of uh apple tourism to go yeah to like learn about this is this a big deal in Kazakhstan? I'm linking a BBC piece about people going to a wild forest of apple trees, where apparently the flavors are bonkers. In modern apple growing, there's a lot of grafting and specific work to make apples match. But apples are what is called heterozygous in a big way. And so each seed could be a totally new variety of apple. And in these wild forests, apparently you get totally novel flavors that just happen as they grow.

So people go there to do some apple tripping. Basically, yeah. Yeah. Like extreme apple experiences. Yeah. Sorry, I was just... You're a dance fan of something. What delicious apple experiences would those might be? Sorry, I was just pottering the idea of extreme apple experiences, what those might be.

I'm thinking of the marketing materials for extreme apple experience. Yeah, apparently some of them have a sweet honey flavor. Some of them taste like various berries you would think of. It seems like if you're the think of. And it seems like if you're the kind of person who's into apple picking or fresh apple donuts, Kazakhstan is

the place to go. Yeah. And I'm curious about these Kazakhstan apples. Yeah. In particular, the big city of Almaty, the largest city in Kazakhstan. Apparently the name comes from an earlier name, Almaada, which translates as father of apples. Wow. Because people there at least have had a general idea going back a long, long time that it's where apples come from. And there's so many apples there. It's common for apple tree seedlings to grow through cracks in the sidewalks

of the city. You know, if only they had the patent. If only they had copyrighted those apples when they had the chance. I think at the least, that city should be called the Big Apple, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right? They could have it. The city of daddy apples.

Yeah, they should just have tourism t-shirts that have an apple on it that just says Daddy across it. Daddy Apple. I mean, it'd work for me. I'd buy 10 of those tank tops. Yeah. The other Apple culture thing I like there is that Kazakhstan is the location of the main Russian space launch facility. It's called Baikonur Cosmodrome. And we'll have a picture linked of what is apparently the traditional celebration

for cosmonauts who land in that area, which is to triumphantly eat an apple. Like these exhausted space guys get handed an apple and they're like, cheers, we did it. Bottom, bottom, bottom, top. Yes. Literally, you got to eat the whole thing. We're on a string-type budget here. Oh, yeah.

What if I was welcomed back to home with a Red Delicious? Oh, yeah, yeah. That's like being spit. Throw it right in their face. Somebody spitting in your face, yeah. Red Delicious and a medical bill. Yeah, and it turns out apples, they truly started in Kazakhstan. They evolved there for about 4.5 million years

and then spread through human trade to the east and to the west, but also primarily through our horses. Erica Janik's book says that one apple seed can be transported in the gut of a horse 40 miles in a single day and so a lot of the first spread was horses eating wild apples and pooping them new places and that got apples out there yeah i was thinking earlier when we're talking about the cyanide i'm like i guess we would probably like if if i was to eat an apple seed i would probably just pass it like i don't think it would break down. And I guess plant itself, like, that should not be broken down so it can be trailed.

Yeah. As long as you don't chew them up, you can go poop them out and grow your own apple tree. Try it at home, folks. So for the low price of one apple, I could get a bunch of seeds so I can make trees that provide infinite apples. And you get to poop outside. And you get to poop outside. And I get to poop outside. All of your favorite things. I should be getting paid.

Just telling the police, I'm a farmer. I'm a farmer. This is okay. This is farming. Stuart became known as Poopy Appleseed. Spreading his waste in apples wherever he went. That makes sense. We're going to talk about Johnny Appleseed, right? Because that was what he was doing, right?

He was just pooping all across the country. That's how he spread his apples. It's like this guy that was caught publicly pooping, so he wove this elaborate tail. Oh, okay. Hang on. Hang on hang on officers i know this looks bad first of all i'm a folk hero second uh yeah he's he's a bonus but we got one more different takeaway for this main show here which is takeaway number four. A Soviet scientist who discovered the origin of apples got purged by Stalin for believing in genetics. Oh, yeah, that was the whole thing.

Yeah, it turns out in the Soviet Union, there was a huge anti-genetics movement, especially in the 1930s and so there is a discoverer of this kazakh origin of apples but for that and other work he was thrown in jail apples yeah i'm gonna blame the apples on this one yeah okay the real red scare is having to eat an apple yeah was he given like an ironic soviet punishment of like he could only eat apples for the rest of his life oh if only they weren't they weren't that fun about it mostly just shooting they weren't creative and fun in Soviet jail? Yeah, no. That's for a future episode on gulags. Right. Yeah, this story, it's basically a battle between two Soviet scientists.

One of them is Nikolai Vavilov, who discovered the origin of apples. In September of 1929, he visited Kazakhstan and he wrote, quote, I could see with my own eyes that I had stumbled upon the center of origin for the apple. He really didn't have a lot of hard data and no DNA, but he just used using the principles of genetics, figured out that the origin point was those mountains near Almaty in Kazakhstan. He met daddy apples. Yeah. And i can see dan already cooking up a screenplay in his head right now about uh two feuding soviet scientists and the origin of apples i mean not to take anything away from this poor scientist who was punished on him yeah

the government but it's not exactly the imitation game of the invention of like computers to be like hey guys i found out where apples came from you know it's like yeah oh cool i mean like that's kind of cool that you were able to track it but it's really you don't shift the universe anyway right before the opening credits there's going to be like some solemn music playing and then text over the screen. And today we know them as apples and we eat a lot of them. Did learning where they come from change any of that? Not really.

No. That was pretty neat. That's fair, yeah. I guess the big practical use of figuring out this kind of stuff is for growing better crops and feeding more people. Okay, now you're selling me. I mean, I don't have any money to make this movie, but your pitch is getting more interesting. From what I know, when we domesticated apples and things like the Red Delicious mistake, it's like when we start to get this this genetic bottleneck we limit sort of the diversity

of apples and then we could have some problems right like some sort of pestilence that wipes out apples so if you know where daddy apples is you can go get some of his like rad sort of diverse dna introduce it to your modern apples and make them taste better or be more resilient to problems um yeah wasn't that yeah wasn't that a problem i feel like i read that about your favorite the banana or something that like one type of banana became the most popular by far and now it's susceptible to disease yeah we we've done a few banana monocultures we had one called the grow michelle that pretty much all died and then we had the cavendish now the cavendish could all die and then we'd need something else and that's kind of banana cultivation it's just constantly

coming up with one banana to grow everywhere and apples apparently more than 90 percent of u.s production is just 15 kinds including the the Red Delicious and the Golden Delicious. And so to me, like only 13 actually good kinds. And that's tough. That's not very many. But Kazakhstan has these forests of a bunch more. Infinite varieties. Yeah.

Infinite. Does Kazakhstan also have WMDs? have WMDs? I'm just saying, do they also have WMDs lying around for that we need to check out? A lot of people don't know Katie is also the George W. Bush administration.

And so that's one of her main things. We need to replace our strategic Apple supply. The daddy axis of apple evil yeah because so the we have nikolai vavilov figures this out in 1929 unfortunately that's right when another scientist named trofim lysenko becomes basically the top soviet scientist mostly because of his politics apparently lysenko was a politically

perfect marxist scientist he was born into a peasant family illiterate until age 13 only went to school because of the russian revolution opening spots for him and he was known as the barefoot scientist he was considered like humble and of the people and so he was stalin's favorite like like the barefoot contessa of soviet science like yeah similar social media presence but and so he he was so marxist he basically rejected rejected genetics in a way that is a little hard to understand. But he believed that Marxism says environment alone can shape us. And so in his reading, plants and animals should work that way, too, just because Marxism is so true.

And he also believed that the acquired characteristics of an individual can be passed on to their offspring which is not really how stuff works and sort of a soviet lamarckism exactly yeah yeah soviet lamarckism and the problem is the so a lot of big ideas from a guy who doesn't wear shoes right riddled with pinworm riddled with it i don't like the idea that like i don't know he's arguing like a squirrel or something like don't you see it's only the situation that has created this need for acorns that's a pretty accurate description of him let's put you over here give you some risotto just be a human nibbles you can do it if you imagine you're a human you can be a human nibbles yeah apparently he would like take winter

wheat and say we can just grow it in spring if we try hard and then take spring wheat and say we can grow it in winter if we just try hard like it was oh i think i remember this guy was he the one that kind of inadvertently killed a lot of people through starvation sounds right yeah one key source here is sam keen who's an amazing writer and podcaster and he says quote it's impossible to say for sure but trofim lysenko probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history wow so. So he was the best. Thought he could, you know, grow these. This is toxic positivity at its worst. Yeah, at its worst, yeah.

Yeah, basically Stalin relentlessly backed him and put him in charge of the whole Soviet food supply, and he caused massive famines. Like, he caused the wheat, rye, potatoes, and beets to totally fail, to name a few crops. And those are some of my favorite crops! And then also, so Lysenko is causing all these crop failures, but the other thing he does is a mass purge of Soviet geneticists. purge of Soviet geneticists. Apparently Russia was a world leader in genetics before this and then

they imprisoned or fired or had declared insane most geneticists. We're a terrible species. Yeah, it's good. The Soviet Union is not around anymore. The guy

took an L on that one, huh? Yeah. Totally whiffed, okay. he summed it up stewart totally whiff but uh but that's yeah that's the the story of where apples come from and how we found out is it's surprisingly fraught you would think yeah it would just be easy to talk about this but the specific country where they're from and the people running it at the time made it a whole convoluted thing for no reason. Took until the 1990s for Vavilov's discovery to get wide notice because they just decided in the

Soviet Union for many years that genetics isn't a thing. And that prevented them from figuring out a lot of stuff. The most important being where apples come from. Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week. And enormous thank you again to Dan McCoy and to Stuart Wellington for coming on, hanging out. Also, they are two of the hosts, along with Elliot Kalin, of The Flophouse, which is an absolutely fantastic movie and comedy podcast here on Maximum Fun. And we want to shout out that they're going to have episode 400 in a few days. Episode 400 of the main episodes of The Flophouse. That's an amazing landmark, and I think I've been listening the entire time. I'm very excited that I've gotten to know them more as we join this network, and also that they're hitting that amazing milestone. So,

shout out to episode 400 of The Flophouse. I believe out within the next week. Just amazing. In the meantime, welcome to the outro of this SIF episode with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, you can go ahead and eat all of an apple. Takeaway number two, apples are sorta kinda pentagrams. Takeaway number three, apples come from Kazakhstan. And takeaway number four, a Soviet scientist who discovered the origin of apples got purged by Stalin for believing in genetics. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now.

If you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is Johnny Appleseed, who was more of a capitalist, more of a freak, and more of an alcohol nut than you would think. Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 12 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows, such as special movie commentaries by the Flophouse guys. It's special audio. It's just for members.

Thank you for being somebody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include the book Apple, A Global History by journalist and radio producer Erika Janik, plus further material from The Atlantic, from WBUR Radio Boston, from National NPR, and so many more sources. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that me and Dan and Stu recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples.

Also, Katie taped this on the traditional land of the Kumeyaay people. We want to acknowledge that in our locations and in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here, and that feels worth doing on each episode. And hey, join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding is something

randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 105. That's about the topic of zippers. Fun fact, modern zippers are the product of a Swedish-American immigrant love story. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Another shout out for The Flophouse, co-hosted by Dan McCoy and Stuart Wellington, along with another friend of this show, Elliot Kalin, right here on Maximum Fun.

Just absolutely one of my favorite podcasts ever. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.

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