What is an apple?
Delicious and crunchy, apple fruit is one of the most popular and favorite fruits among the health conscious, fitness lovers who firmly believe in the concept of “health is wealth.” This beautiful fruit packed with rich phytonutrients that, in the real sense indispensable for optimal health. Certain antioxidants in apples have health promoting and disease prevention properties, and thereby, truly justifying the adage, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
The tree originated in Central Asia, where its wild ancestor, Malus sieversii, is still found today. Apples have been grown for thousands of years in Asia and Europe, and were brought to North America by European colonists.
They were cultivated in Jamestown—but not for eating. North American apple harvesting began with the settlers at Jamestown in 1607. They brought with them seeds and cuttings from Europe, and while the original varieties planted were not all suited for cultivation in the New World, their seeds began to produce all-new varieties of American apples. Many of these apples were still fairly bitter, unlike the sweet varieties we enjoy today, but they had an important purpose in colonial society: cider.
Cider had become a popular beverage in England in the wake of the Norman conquest in 1066, after which new apple varieties were introduced from France. The New World settlers brought their taste for cider with them. Most colonists grew their own apples, and due to sanitation concerns, they often served a fermented cider at meals instead of water, including a diluted cider for the children. Cider became so popular that it was sometimes used to pay salaries, and Virginian statesman William Fitzhugh once remarked that the cider produced from his orchard of 2,500 trees was more valuable than 15,000 pounds of tobacco.
Thomas Jefferson was also a founding father of the Fuji. Thomas Jefferson is not only a founding father of the United States, he’s also known for his love of food—in fact, he was responsible for America’s first ice cream and some of its first pasta. And he helped bring the popular Fuji apple to the United States, albeit unwittingly. As the story goes, Edmund Charles Genet, French minister to the United States in the 1790s, gave Thomas Jefferson a gift of apple cuttings that Jefferson donated to a Virginia nursery, which then cultivated a variety of apple known as the “Ralls Genet.” In 1939, Japanese apple breeders crossed the genes from the classic Red Delicious apple variety with that of Jefferson’s Ralls Genet, resulting in the now ubiquitous Fuji apple.