Sinfully Delicious Apples That You Should Never Try to Eat
A few years ago, Jessica Rath, an artist based in Los Angeles, [realized that she didn’t actually know very much about how apples varieties came in to being]. She was reading Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire and learned about the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Genetic Resources Unit (PGRU) located on part of Cornell University’s campus in Geneva, New York. Pollan described this facility as a “botanic ark,” since it preserves living trees of some of the rarest and most endangered apple varieties.
[I]f you plant an apple tree from a seed, odds are its apples will be bitter. This is the case even if you pluck a seed from the tastiest apple in the orchard and plant it, because each seed has its own genetic material. To replicate a tree with sweet apples, orchardists, therefore, graft from that tree and produce a field of clones.
To Rath, this idea that the edible apple is a human creation—a work of art, even—was spellbinding.
“What other than taste was attractive to a man or a woman over the hundred years that he decided to graft that tree?” says Rath. “Was it the blush of a cheek? Its whiteness? Or possibly its muscular size?”
What constituted beauty, she wondered, in the scientist’s eye?
To create her tempting porcelain apples, Rath began by sculpting the apple out of clay. Then, she created a plaster mold of that sculpture and poured porcelain slip, which is a liquid clay, into that mold. Once the porcelain dried and shrank away from the mold, it was removed. The result is a hollow porcelain replica of the original sculpture.
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