Dysfunction, Globalization And The Search For The English Apple - Guardian

[hatrack]

EDIT

Not far away, Hobday watched dogfights and vapour trails in the sky of September 1940. "Exciting times for a boy - we collected all kinds of stuff, shrapnel, bits of German uniforms, that kind of thing." The English apple would have been coming into season that month, as in every year since the Romans introduced it nearly 2,000 years before. Henry VIII had orchards nearby in Teynham, and from about that time the apple began to be seen as a patriotic food. In an excellent history, The New Book of Apples by Joan Morgan and Alison Richards, the authors say it was an especially Protestant fruit, one favoured by God's Elect as the food men and women ate before the Fall. It was conventional wisdom that France had no decent apples, the French being besotted with the pear.

Then things began to go wrong. When, in the 18th century, beer finally won its battle with cider as the national drink, many orchards were grubbed up. Worse was to come when Britain adopted a free-trade policy and lowered the duty on imported foodstuffs. French, American and empire apples were crated and barrelled into every industrial town. By the 1840s the Kentish orchards "had become gnarled, cankered and unproductive". Some new and interesting varieties were introduced: Richard Cox, a retired brewer, grew his first Orange Pippins near Slough in 1825. But their commercial sale had to wait on English apples' revival, which came with the founding of the British Pomological Society in 1854, the National Fruit Campaign of 1883, and a working-class hunger for cheap jam. In the last two decades of the 19th century, orchards were growing at the rate of about 1,200 hectares a year.

Today Britain imports about three-quarters of the apples it eats. Rising cider sales and supermarket promotions have helped a small revival. Tesco, which funds some of Brogdale's work, claims to have doubled sales of British apples since 2005, though it could provide no figures. This is good news for the patriotic apple-eater, but Brogdale itself is a more typical British story of managerial confusion and government ineptitude. The word "dysfunctional" can't be avoided. Until 1990, when it was saved from closure by horticulturalists and botanists including Prince Charles, Brogdale was a government scientific research station on government land. Seventeen years later, after a chronology of great complexity and argument, a property developer owns the land and most of the revenue from the farm, including the shop. The trees that grow on the land are owned by the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) and curated by Imperial College. The Brogdale Horticultural Trust, whose chief executive is Lady (Jane) Garrett, the wife of a Tory party grandee, maintains the buildings and orchards and looks after the visitors. None of these parties is on the best of terms with each other. One of the minor results is that Brogdale has no printed guide and the shop is bereft of any informative books about fruit. A more important one is that Brogdale can't seem to decide whether it's a centre of horticultural science or a horticultural museum.

Earlier this year Defra put the future of the National Fruit Collection out to contract. It may move elsewhere. Thousands of trees will need replanting. To anyone interested in the story of England's noble fruit, this could be a larger tragedy than the coming of the Golden Delicious.

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http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2164935,00.html

[XemaSab]

1. Anyone interested in apples needs to read "The Botany of Desire"

by Michael Pollan.

Heck, everyone should read it. :)

[kestrel91316]

2. It's on my list. I'm reading The Omnivore's Dilemma right now.