International Eat an Apple Day

Apples began in the wild forests of Central Asia, near the Tien Shan mountains of present-day Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, where they grew so abundantly that Almaty, Kazakhstan's largest city, roughly translates to ‘Father of Apples.’ Traders carried them west along the Silk Road, and European colonists brought seeds and saplings to North America in the early 1700s.

In the 1800s, John Chapman, better known as Johnny Appleseed, planted orchards across the American frontier, turning the apple into a symbol of settlement and self-reliance. Selective breeding since then has produced roughly 7,500 varieties worldwide, though only about a hundred are grown commercially in the United States, from Honeycrisp to Granny Smith to the Cosmic Crisp, a Honeycrisp and Enterprise cross that made headlines in 2019.

The apple's cultural roots run just as deep. A golden apple sparked the Trojan War in the Iliad, the Norse goddess Idunn granted eternal youth through apples, and the saying ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away’ traces to an 1866 Pembrokeshire proverb before the modern version was coined in 1913. In 2010, scientists sequenced the apple genome and found it holds about 21,000 more genes than the human genome.

The day's timing is no accident: the third Saturday of September lands squarely in harvest season. Bite into a variety you have never tried, visit an orchard or farmers market, or bake the classic pie. However you eat it, the apple has earned its celebration.