Johnny AppleseedBeth is a student in the Baccalaureate Honors Program at her university. Students in the program get the opportunity to meet an author at an informal dinner and discuss their book with them. She was recently sent the book The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. Beth is reading another book at the moment so I grabbed Mr Pollan’s book and started reading it.

Mr. Pollan’s book is about how plant’s have evolved to satisfy our needs and how by doing that we have satisfied their needs. He starts with the apple tree and soon starts discussing John Chapman, a gentleman that most of us know better as Johnny Appleseed. Johnny was a bit of a nut. For example, he once threw away his shoe to punish his foot for stepping on a worm. But Johnny was much more than just a nut. Johnny used to go to the cider mills in Western Pennsylvania and get the seeds from the part of the apple that was being thrown away. Apple seeds have a little bit of cyanide in them which makes them very bitter so cider mills are careful about always throwing them away. Johnny would then take these seeds to where no one lived but where he thought people would soon be moving. He would plant his seeds and grow apple trees. Five years later when people moved into the area (Johnny was very good at guessing which areas would become popular) he would sell his trees. The law at the time required that anyone claiming land had to grow fifty apple trees to show that they were serious about living on the land. Johnny did so well with his apple tree business that he died a very wealthy man.

But here’s the part that Disney never mentions. Apple trees grown from seeds produce very sour fruit that is almost always inedible. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “[the apples] were sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” The apples that we get in the store are always grown by grafting. So if Johnny’s apples were inedible what did people do with them? They made them into hard cider. Yep, as Mr. Pollan writes, “Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.” And that is the real story of Johnny Appleseed.