While in New Orleans last month, Lisa and I went to a play about John Chapman, aka Johnny Appleseed. It was…creative. Anyway, it got me to thinking about Johnny Appleseed. If you’re like me, you probably grew up with this version of him, from Disney:
Starting at about 4:55, they list all the delicious foods they’ve made from apples–pastries, dumplings, pickles, and so on. The Johnny Appleseed Junior Ecology Club mentions “how delicious those apples would be,” that his trees meant “everyone could afford fresh fruit,” and that they made a “wonderful drink called apple cider.”
Or maybe you saw images like this:
The image, overall, is of an eccentric but kindly man who went around planting apples so pioneers could have fresh, healthy fruit to eat.
In his book The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan discusses Johnny Appleseed. He really did exist, and he did travel around the frontier planting apples from apple seeds and later selling the apples to pioneers (and apparently giving lots of trees away, too). He was, by all accounts, extremely eccentric, wearing sackcloth as a tunic for clothing, going barefoot much of the time, and so on. He was a vegetarian, though I don’t know if chipmunks and other animals pranced around in the woods with him.
But there’s a little detail the Disney movie and all the kids’ books about Johnny Appleseed got wrong. His apples weren’t for eating. They were for liquor. Apples don’t grow “true” from seeds–that is, if you plant a Granny Smith apple seed, the tree that grows will not produce Granny Smith apples (the vast majority of the time, anyway). The only way to be sure what kind of apples a tree will produce is to graft limbs onto it from another apple tree that has the kind of apples you want. Most trees that grow from seeds produce smallish apples that are bitter and very much unlike the glowing waxed fruit we’ve come to associate with health and a good diet. People would not want to eat those apples. But what they could do with them is turn them into apple cider, as the Junior Ecology Club mentions, but not the kind you buy at the grocery store around Thanksgiving. It was alcoholic apple cider.
For much of American history, alcoholic beverages were widely consumed by both adults and children. Before clean water was necessarily available, it was safer to drink alcohol, particularly in cities.
So how did we go from apples as source of liquor to apples as healthy fresh fruit? According to The Straight Dope,
We stopped drinking apples and started eating them in the early 1900s. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union publicized the evils of alcohol, the movement towards Prohibition was gaining momentum, and the apple industry saw the need to re-position the apple…We can thank prohibition for shifting the image of the apple to the healthy, wholesome, American-as-apple-pie fruit that it is today.
Anyway, it’s sort of a funny instance of both the way we sanitize history and of re-branding. Most of us, raised on images of Laura Ingalls Wilder, can’t imagine early pioneers drinking alcohol all day and happily giving it to their children, or that there might be legitimate reasons for doing so (protecting your kids from getting dysentery from polluted water, for instance). And apples have become such an icon of health that the idea of campaigns against them as sources of liquor is unimaginable.
UPDATE: Commenter 2becontinued says,
I watched both parts of the Disney video, and being someone who’s getting into American Indian stuff right now, I noticed that the Johnny Appleseed legend sanitizes history in another way, namely Manifest Destiny and colonization of America. For example, in the second part of the Disney Johnny Appleseed video (which can be seen after the first part of the video in the post) there’s a scene where Johnny Appleseed looks on a dance that includes white settlers and Indians, because he enjoys seeing how his apples “bring people together”. This of course erases the conflicts between white settlers and Indians when settlers got the “frontier spirit” and moved west. Although that’s just the Disney video as a sample, the whole Johnny Appleseed legend as a whole seems to sanitize Manifest Destiny and its effects.
