Remember when you used
to bring an apple to the teacher? Probably not, but in the American mind,
this was always a big thing, right? The classic image of a teacher’s desk
with papers and pens and inboxes and outboxes, and a shiny red apple up front
for all to see. There was the apple-polisher stereotype, that one kid who
was so intent on impressing the teacher that he or she was the one who always
brought that apple. The ones who didn’t were the kids who threw spitballs
and dunked the pigtails of the little girls who sat in front of them into their
inkwells.
During my brief career
as a teacher, I can tell you that spitballs are still a thing, though inkwells
are not. And giving apples to the teacher isn’t a thing, either. Not that I’d have minded a student bringing
me an apple; it just never happened to me. I never saw it happen when I
was a student, either, back in 19(ahem).
Yet we still link apples and teachers in our minds—good teachers,
anyway. Teachers’ organizations in
America often use an apple as part of their logos, even though there’s likely
no one alive who remembers seeing a teacher’s desk cluttered up with fruit.
Where does this idea come from?
The answer goes back a
long way, well before public education got to be widespread in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries. In America, it started as early as the
Jamestown colony in Virginia, in the early 1600s. There were no public schools in the English
colonies, so the colonists had to invent their own. They would recruit
teachers and work out some kind of payment system. Payment was often made in food, and it was
common for students to be expected to bring their teachers something, usually
an apple (or, later on, a potato). A little bit from every student added
up to a lot in a very short time.
Did teachers thus have
to sustain themselves on apples? Yes and no. The apple trees in colonial America were not
the well-bred apples that had been cultivated for millennia in Asia and Europe.
These were planted from apple seeds.
You could do the same thing, if you wanted, and get the same uncertain
result: apples that taste nothing like the fruit they came from, and that are
most likely bitter. The only way to grow existing varieties of apples is
to take buds or branches from existing trees and graft them onto other apple
trees. A tree that springs from an apple
seed could potentially produce a good-tasting apple, but you couldn’t count on
it. You can bet teachers didn’t eat these; no one would.
Bad-tasting apples are
good for one thing: pressing into hard cider. The early colonies had the
same problem that plagued Americans for their first three centuries: no
reliable access to clean water. So if you’re going to get the fluids you
need to stay alive, hard cider was your best bet, since germs didn’t survive
the fermentation process. It was normal for colonists to rely on hard
cider or beer for hydration, and as someone who’s had to deal with classrooms
full of children all day, good, strong drink is sometimes an absolute
necessity.
As time went on,
plumbing and water treatment improved, so you didn’t have to drink alcohol if
you didn’t want to. There were also good-tasting apples available for
consumption by the 19th century.
However, the apple’s reputation as a source of alcohol hounded it still.
Since you could make hard cider from apples, it was often assumed
that people with access to apples would do that. The famous anti-alcohol
crusader Carrie Nation had it in for apples, too. Carrie Nation is best remembered for charging
into bars with an axe and smashing the establishments up, due to her firm
belief, in step with the Temperance Society, that alcohol will mean the
corruption and the downfall of society. It’s less remembered that Nation
would take her axe to apple trees, as well, knocking them down in the name of
making America sober again (though it never really was sober in the first
place).
It was around this time
that America’s apple growers realized they had an image problem, and started a
public relations campaign for the fruit. Advertisements featuring
healthy, happy, active children started to flood magazines and public
spaces. Patriotic themes, too. It’s around this time that the expression “An
apple a day keeps the doctor away” gained currency. It’s true that it
started out as a folksy aphorism dating back to Roman times, but it made its
way into regular use in the 1920s, when apples’ image was on the upswing.
Today, Americans
typically think of the non-alcoholic version of cider first. Hard cider
has had a rocky road in America, going from its original place as essential to
survival to the tipple of the backwoods drunkard to a menace to society, it
managed to reform itself by losing its alcohol. In recent years, hard
cider has made something of a comeback, available in many bars and
supermarkets, riding on the same wave of success that the craft beer revolution
seems to be enjoying. It’s almost like a
corruption of a once-wholesome fruit. But the apple, like many of us, has
a checkered past, with some good and some questionable history. Is it an angel or a devil? That’s an awful lot to ask of a fruit.
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