Apples and apple growers are in trouble. At one time, North America had over 14,000 apple varieties populating habitats from coast to coast. But in the 2001 Fruit, Berry and Nut Inventory published by Seed Savers Exchange (Whealy, 2001), the number of apple varieties available to Americans through nursery stocks had dwindled to 1,500. The continued tragedy is that in 2009, only 11 apples comprise 90% of what Americans access and enjoy.

I hadn’t thought closely about apples until this spring when apple experts and advocates from across the United States met in Madison, Wisconsin. Under the leadership of Dr. Gary Nabhan, founder and facilitator of the Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) alliance, and Jenny Trotter of Slow Food-USA, nearly 20 apple experts assembled for a “Forgotten Fruits Summit” to discuss the alarming decline of apple varieties and identify strategies for maintaining apples in the landscape.

The Summit marked the inaugural summit for RAFT’s Heirloom Apple community. This collection of apple enthusiasts have spent their entire lives grafting, pruning, harvesting, pressing, enjoying and fighting for apples. Their earnest conversations and easy laughter showed how they recognized the importance of enjoying as much as fighting for apple culture. Dialogue freely slipped between debating technical pest management techniques to exchanging culinary tasting notes, underscoring a shared passion and awareness that their work has both ecological and cultural value: to conserve both genetic diversity and food traditions.

Nabhan describes that these apple growers “have all worked so hard in their parts of the country to grow apples and record their names and stories. Each is so intent on rescuing apple history in their neck of the woods, that they never had time to meet each other.”

As the experts went around the room and introduced themselves, it soon became clear that they were not just talking about apples. But, equally, their life stories were being told by apples that they have grown, written about and even brought on the plane to share. So much of who these apple growers are is a reflection of the landscape they come from.

Take Tom Burford from Virginia, who is a self-confessed apple grower, corrupter and educator. He begins his story relating how he “was born under an apple tree on a very hot August day in 1935. My mother and grandmother went to harvest some Smokehouse apples to fry for supper. When my mother arrived at the tree, she said ‘I think I’d better go back to the house,’ and ten minutes later I came into the world. And because my life has since been devoted to apples, I later would kid her, ‘Mother, why couldn’t you just let me be born under the apple tree?’ That would have added a more flavorful tale to my life story. But she replied, ‘Son, it would have been comfortable for you, but not comfortable for me.’”

Burford’s early exposure to apples grew into a lifelong vocation that took a unique turn later in life. He had a production nursery for 40 years, but the growing loss of fruit tree diversity made him realize training new growers was crucial to the apple’s survival.

“My work today is about education. I want to help people discover that they can have a passion for apples.”

Apples have a system for storing and transmitting their genetic information, passing on their traits from generation to generation through seeds. Similarly, cultures create systems for passing on knowledge and tools to a new generation to ensure the vitality and health of their communities. Burford is one of these “cultural pollinators,” sharing his knowledge with young growers to ensure trees and traditions have a future.

“A decade ago, I would never have dreamed that we would be together in this room. That we would be a driving force to help nurture the future of the apple in America,” Burford reflects. And their work couldn’t come at a more critical time.

The core task put before the fruit experts at their summit was this: to discuss the country’s declining apple diversity in order to identify strategies for restoration and raise a new generation to the trade.

Nabhan continues with the shared responsibility of this work, stating that “we all have to re-imagine this apple culture we are talking about… the trouble is a lot of the antique apples are now grown by antique people, and we need to be sure a new generation is brought into the fold. It is just as important for the elders to know their excitement and passion for apples is being heard and wanted by the next generation.”

Following the Forgotten Fruits Summit, RAFT hosted a one-day workshop for beginning apple growers. This hands-on workshop featured classroom instruction and a field trip to local abandoned orchards with instructors Dan Bussey (Wisconsin orchardist and author) and Kanin Routson (University of Arizona). It drew over 40 participants from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan.

Some of the fruit experts were able to participate in this training, sharing their knowledge with the next generation of fruit growers.

Burford speaks that, “propagation itself is the element that defines society. Today, the people who hold power in our society are in technology. In my time, the agriculturalists held the power. We need to understand this, and we need to see a shift… so that agriculturalists and those who care for our land have [greater] representation again. This is why we need to teach people not just where food comes from, but also to empower them to grow it for themselves. Propagation is power. That is why, for me, doing grafting workshops is so important.”

It is our shared traditions and the sense of coming from a place that gives each of us character, identity and flavor. But it also gives our communities character, identity and meaning. We need these traditions and we need to support the next generation of growers who ensure they are not forgotten.

Slow Food-USA has placed 129 varieties on its “Ark of Taste” to raise awareness and encourage interest in these regional and heritage varieties. For more information on the American apple, click here.

Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) is a national alliance, managed by Slow Food USA, committed to restoring America’s agricultural biodiversity and developing a public understanding of place-based foods. For the past five years, the RAFT alliance has been bringing food producers, chefs and consumers together to develop and promote conservation strategies, sustainable food production, and awareness of our country’s unique and endangered foods and food traditions. RAFT uses an eater-based approach to conservation –reintroducing the stories and flavors of America’s traditional foods to larger audiences, so people are once again growing and consuming them sustainably. Founding RAFT partners include: American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, Chefs Collaborative, Cultural Conservancy, Native Seeds/SEARCH, Seed Savers Exchange, Slow Food USA, and Dr. Gary Nabhan.

For more information about the work of RAFT and future workshops, visit: http://www.slowfoodusa.org/index.php/programs/details/raft/.

Photos: Mark Dohm

Few people have been working as tirelessly to preserve the diversity of American foods than Gary Nabhan. Nabhan is a man who likes to shun labels and boundaries. He’s a professor of Geography, a conservationist, a poet, a rancher, a prolific author, and the founder of two groundbreaking food advocacy groups: Native Seeds/SEARCH focusing on preserving indigenous southwestern seeds, and later the RAFT alliance of food, farming, environmental and culinary advocates.

The author of numerous books, his most recent title is Where Our Food Comes From, describing a round the world journey that Nabhan took retracing the steps of food pioneer Nikolay Vavilov.

When I caught up with Nabhan for this interview, we discussed some of the impacts of modern farming, the implications of biological complexity, and the direction of the sustainable food movement.

French: In an article a while ago I quoted a friend of mine who said “Agriculture has become one of the most destructive activities in the world,” and I received a lot of angry response from farmers.

Nabhan: But look at the floods in recent years – we caused this. We removed the bottomland forests and we simplified ecosystems. As I literally flew from Madison to Denver, and I just saw water moving soil to the Mississippi mouth and into the Gulf and we now have an anoxic zone in the Gulf of Mexico killing fisheries for miles.

French: I’ve been looking for a farmer to stand up and say “This is a preventable disaster,” after the last floods, but I didn’t hear anyone say, “We can prevent this? We can keep our farms and soil intact.”

Nabhan: When RAFT came out with advice and went to the Plains states, I said “Look, when we had Bison on perennial prairies of legumes, grasses, and sunflowers, we also had micro Buffalo wallows that kept the water and nutrients in place, and created an array of water and habitat to support Prairie Chickens and game birds. And if we move back to a perennial wild-lands based food system and use bison to restore the prairies we wouldn’t have this flooding.

French: And did people hear you?

Nabhan: No, they responded “What are you talking about? I have my bison in a feedlot. People will expect free range bison, and we don’t have the land for that!”

French: So, now we’re in the situation where the direction we are going in isn’t working, but we’re exporting it worldwide as fast as we can while we’re retreating from it slowly ourselves…isn’t that a crazy conundrum?

Nabhan: It’s always tough when you tell other people “Oh, don’t go down that path.” And they look at your lifestyle and say “You’re telling us to be more sustainable??” There are incredible ironies there. We will never pump from the ground as much fossil fuel and ground water again as we have in the last century. It’s just never going to be that subsidized for cheap natural resources.

And so we are going to have to return to the biological wisdom embedded in the natural food diversity and local knowledge. And fortunately, other countries are still closer to those wellsprings of food security than we are.

French: But it’s changing so quickly, isn’t it? You probably heard about the decline of the Mediterranean Diet. As fast and convenience foods enter the small Mediterranean towns, people are getting heart disease and diabetes for the first time.

Nabhan: Yes, and not just there, but all over the world.

French: So, in this modern environment what guides us in the right direction?

Nabhan: Well, I live in the Arizona desert and make sun tea and drink it all the time. When I was on the road I used to get Arizona Iced Tea, without realizing that the number one ingredient was fructose, and that drinking all that fructose was changing my satiation patterns. And so my point is that things that formally worked in our bodies to keep that compass aligned are now getting mixed signals or being completely deceived by the chemicals embedded in our foods.

French: Just like the California condors are killing their chicks by feeding them bottle caps and other metal objects.

Nabhan: Right, good food is not hardwired. My Why Some Like It Hot book is on that topic of complexity. Being trained as a scientist we know there are gene-environment interactions. It’s not solely biological determinism, it’s also environmental feedback loops – that triumvirate of “cultural, environmental, and genetic” – gets you into some complex areas where the signals are easily fooled and confounded.

French: With the biotechnology industry trying to produce food that is “better,” on the website of Monsanto they cite a farmer-scientist saying, roughly, I’m comfortable knowing that farmers are good stewards of what they are doing. We should trust the farmers, therefore the food is good.

Nabhan: You know, I see so many parallels between what’s happening in our economy overall and what’s happening in our food systems, there are parallel philosophies. We’ve over-valued certain things, we’ve forgotten certain things. Just like the money between banks in this way that everyone is counting it as collateral and we have home prices ascending but everyone knew it was a paper empire that was going to collapse. This is the same as planting 20 million acres of a GMO corn in the first year that this corn is released. Inevitably, there are going to be problems with that. That we are going to break down the reciprocity with a particular pest control, whether it’s inserted into the genome of the corn or hand applied by an organic gardener corn silk, we are going to lose the effectiveness of any pest control strategy if we put it out on 20 million acres at the same time. So, the probability that we are going to see a collapse of industrial agriculture parallel with the related collapse of our financial system is just not prophecy, its inevitability.

French: Are we going in the right direction, for a sustainable food movement?

Nabhan: My hesitation is what Wendell Berry says “be skeptical of all movements. So don’t Missionize anything.” Because we already know what part of the problem that Missionizing creates, when you say “Think like me.” That’s a major problem.

There are really only two kinds of cultures in the world: the ones that try to convert others to their values and the ones that are susceptible to being converted – in part because they resist converting anyone to themselves.

French: There’s a new study, by the National Wildlife Federation, about the decline of teaching ecology and environmental topics in the United States. There are fewer courses taught, and fewer courses required, in America’s college campuses. Meanwhile, there is an increase of environmental awareness overall.

Nabhan: Why aren’t we teaching every kid natural history, rather than thinking that we can have good environmental scientists that don’t even know the birds and butterflies and plants that are in their ecosystem models? I mean, I really don’t understand the logic!

French: Because more than ever, as green and eco and buzzwords are flying around…

Nabhan: Well, I don’t think that sustainability has any meaning anymore, it’s been distorted so much.

French: Even the USDA says that “some terms defy definition. Sustainable agriculture is one of them.”

Nabhan: Unbelievable. Well, the USDA can’t talk to people about values. And sustainable is a values based idea.