apples

I love apples (I genuinely do eat one every day) and find this time of year very exciting, when there are many different kinds to choose from, especially russets (my favourite) cox’s and other delicious seasonal varieties local to the UK. When preparing my piece about Syme’s Nomenclature a few days ago, I noticed just how many of his vegetable reference points were apple related: apples appear in the red colour category ( “red on the golden rennette apple”), the green category (“Irish pitcher apple”), and the orange category (“marigold apple”). Perhaps Syme was just as fond of russet apples as I am, for the nonpareil variety (an old russet cultivar) appears in two different colour categories, green (“nonpareil apple from the wall”) and yellow (“greenish parts of nonpareil apple”)

An apple is a thing of nature, but it is quite definitively an object of culture too: a domestic crop that humans at different times and in different places have bred, refined, and grown extremely carefully to suit particular climates and soil conditions, as well as different consumer tastes and preferences. Colour is a crucial determining factor of such tastes and preferences – but what colour do we want our apples to be?

When you close your eyes and picture an apple, what colours appear? I see an object of a pale brownish-greenish hue, with a slight red-ish blush upon it (clearly russets are my apple ideé fixe). But depending on where you are in the world, your cultural associations, and your own personal experiences and memories of seeing and eating apples, the object that appears in your mind’s eye might be very different indeed: your imaginary apple might be bright green or deep red, streaky pink or pale gold.

Do such differences matter? Clearly they do to apple producers, who are continually striving to optimise and standardise the colours of their fruits to meet the demands of particular markets (as described in this recent article in the FT). They matter to consumers, too: for my brownish greenish russet might seem a distinctly unappetising prospect if what you see when you picture an apple is a glorious big red shiny orb.

The relationship between palate and palette has been very much on my mind since I started reading and writing about colour last year. I now find that I’m continually thinking about how the colour of food – as well as the colour of our own memories about food – profoundly affects our perception and experience of what we eat. Where apples are concerned, it might seem possible to make some generalisations: most of us associate the colour green with tart and crisp flavours, while the colour red often suggests sweetness. Red is also the hue that allows ripe fruits of many different kinds to stand out from their surroundings, and this deep association of red with ripe-ness and good-to-eat ness, might account, in part, for what’s sometimes assumed to be a universal preference for red apples. We might justify our apple predilections, then, with what seems to be a “natural” or instinctual fondness for fruits of ripe, red hue, but our preferences for the colours of other “natural” foods are completely culturally contingent.

Eggs, for example, come in many beautiful shades, dependent on the breed of bird that laid them. Eggs of all hues are great to eat, but our egg colour preferences can differ widely based on where in the world we are located. British consumers, for example, long familiar with eating brown eggs, have proved somewhat unwilling to buy the white-shelled varieties that have been introduced to supermarkets in recent years.

If our only experience of eating mayonnaise is from a supermarket jar, we may find the yellowish appearance of mayonnaise made at home with fresh egg yolks weird or unappetising. But what precise shade of yellow, white, or white-ish yellow best suggests the colour of mayonnaise to the majority of consumers? What shade do you see when you picture mayonnaise?

Perceptions of the “rightness or “wrongness” of the hues of particular foods are, as I said, completely culturally contingent, but they really have a huge determining influence on the way the food we eat is made. Colour standards – such as the one the United States Department of Agriculture produces for the optimum shade of frozen french fried potatoes – not only address our assumed preferences about the “rightness” of particular food colours but help embed such preferences (and prejudices) further into culture.

And colour is not only a factor affecting our perceptions of the “rightness” or palatability of food itself, but an important determining feature of its packaging, marketing and branding. In a way I’m sure is utterly baffling to anyone outside of the UK, British consumers have very strong opinions about the “right” shade of bag in which crisps flavoured “salt and vinegar”, “cheese and onion” or “ready salted” are contained. But what, apart from branding, associates blue-ness with vinegar, green-ness with cheese, or red-ness with salt?

(crunch, crunch, I don’t want no lunch . . . )

In world of mass produced and mass marketed consumables, food colours and flavours are necessarily subject to increasing standardisation (and increasing uniformity). But, despite the modern industrial world of colour standards, despite our own deeply embedded senses of “rightness” or “wrongness” where palate and palette are concerned, the question of the colour of an apple – of what is or is not “apple coloured” – remains, in the end impossible to define.

As the vast range of hues that the TCCA has, at different times, listed under the name of “apple” powerfully suggests, colour continually defies all human attempts at standardisation. Just like flavour, colour is a quality both of things and modes of perception that is ephemeral and tricksy, slipping away from us as quickly as we try to capture or arrest it. And the colour of an apple is, in the end, really mostly about us and where we are: it’s a matter of our place in the world, our cultural moment, our personal experiences and memories, our individual ways of seeing, tasting, savouring. And did you know that far from ever being generic, or standard, apples are heterozygotes: unique individuals, just like us?

Further reading

If you (like me) enjoy the defiant individuality and eccentricity of apples, then there is no better book for you than William Mullan’s beautiful and brilliant Odd Apples, which is also a completely joyous celebration of colour. And for a greater understanding of the role of apples in human history and culture more generally, I recommend Apples and People.