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Wild or Not-Wild? Pomarium Renaissance®

 

We grow our fruit in an orchard…so how can we call our fruit wild?

There isn’t much of a precedent to guide how we should describe the wild features of our fruit. It is naturally wild-flavoured. It is wild-sourced. But can something that is grown deliberately, cultivated, still be described as "wild"? 

Partly this is a problem of not having access to words and concepts in our language. But the language hasn’t developed because we haven’t needed such words and concepts. The idea of integrating or injecting wild into agriculture, of what it might mean to cultivate wild foods, has been largely absent.

Gathering wild foods by foraging or harvesting nuts in forests is different from cultivating wild-sourced trees in an orchard—more of an in-between concept that blurs the lines we normally rely on to categorize our foods.

Throughout the ages, foods adapted from the wild have undergone changes as they have been cultivated and domesticated. And now the very concept of what it means to domesticate trees in the apple family is itself being questioned:

“Hybrid fruit trees do not represent ‘domestication’ the same as domesticated grasses; the introgression of traits is often not fixed and only maintained through cloning. Likewise, traits associated with fruit shape, size, sugar content, color, and texture are often highly plastic or variability; the role of developmental plasticity in these trees is poorly understood…Ultimately, the rule book for domestication needs to be rewritten…” (Spengler, "Origins of the Apple", May 2019. See Resources page.)

 

If an apple tree can only be maintained through cloning, its seeds will revert to behaving as they would have had the tree never been cloned. Apple trees do not propagate their own image but reproduce as if they'd never left the wild. The same may be said to apply both to clones of eating apple trees and to clones of the trees we have selected from our test orchards to grow in our commercial orchard. In that sense, it could be argued that neither eating apples or our tiny apples are domesticated, regardless of whether or not they have been cloned/grafted or whether the tree is growing in an orchard.

 

 

Wildness does or not require care and feeding?

For grafting and growing in orchards, humans made selections from wild trees and also hybridized new varieties of apple, looking for those most likely to produce larger fruit or plants, disease resistance, unusual characteristics, visual appeal, tolerance of drought or wet conditions, fit for some specific location, storability, and, of course, whatever flavour was in fashion at the time.

Some trees may have had varying levels of phytochemicals to start with. Hybridizing also created opportunities to accidentally or intentionally alter the nutritional profile of trees…whether ‘nutritional’ from the plant’s own perspective or from the human perspective.

Trees that are deficient in some phytonutrients require extensive assistance from humans in order to survive, thrive, and produce marketable fruit. (See discussion of USDA attempts to reintroduce genes from wild trees under “About Ålmarium Sours”.)

It is no accident that what makes our tiny apple fruits flavourful is directly related to various phytochemicals, some more flavourful than others. Phytochemicals that are beneficial to the trees are phytonutrients, used to protect the tree’s own health and help it reproduce by creating fruit. 

Many phytonutrients in the trees are also sought by humans to manage human health. When our focus is human health, we refer to these same phytonutrients as polyphenols. Phloridzin, for example, is a polyphenol (and also a phytonutrient and also a phytochemical) that is present in significantly higher quantities in the fruit of our wild-sourced trees with tiny fruits. Trees in the Apple family use it for their own purposes.

So, it could be argued that whether wild trees require care and feeding may be a sliding scale. On such a sliding scale, trees are tame not because they are grown in orchards but when they are heavily dependent on humans for survival. 

 

 

Wildness carried forward by selecting for wild qualities?

Wild flavours came to be rejected as unsuitable for fresh eating apples or bred out of apples as they were cultivated, either deliberately or unintentionally as byproducts of breeding out other undesirable characteristics. The varieties of eating apple that become most popular have low levels of acid, are sweet, and have visual appeal. 

Wild apples are not always small and bitter. For example, the McIntosh apple was cloned from a seedling found by chance. From amongst its siblings, it was selected to be cloned because people wanted to eat that particular fruit more than they wanted to eat the fruit of its siblings. But not because it tasted wild.

At Ålmarium Sours, on the other hand, we are selecting which seedlings to grow in our orchard precisely because of our search for wild flavour. Instead of searching out fruit that has a tamer flavour, we continue to search for the best wild flavours that can be blended together into a very complex taste experience. 

In selecting apple trees from a test or experimental orchard, we are following the same method used by European settlers who arrived in North America to find a native species of crab, Malus coronaria, in no way similar to the eating apples they’d left behind in Europe. And many of the European varieties of apple they brought with them simply did not thrive in this new location.

In the tradition popularized by the Johnny Appleseed stories, ‘test’ or experimental orchards were nothing more than apple trees grown from seed. All that was required of these seedlings was fruit suitable for cider-making. As a bonus, however, because these were seedlings, each of these trees was a 'snowflake'—differing from all other trees. The high degree of variability amongst apple trees meant that there were new varieties of apple to be found. Trees with edible fruits could be selected from the seedling orchards and grafted to be grown in orchards.

Our own test/experimental orchard method is similar but there are at least two significant differences.  The first is that we start with seeds from tiny apples, hoping to increase the odds of getting seedlings that will grow tiny fruit. The second is that we select not for fresh eating qualities but for wild flavours.

Tiny apple fruit has an advantage that works in favour of Pomarium Renaissance. In comparison with larger apples, each small fruit has a higher ratio of peel to flesh. Peel is that part of the fruit that comes equipped to protect the flesh while seeds mature. The peel can make a significant contribution to flavour because, in part at least, it is in defence-mode—armed with phytochemicals,  some of which are also its phytonutrients. These service the tree and its fruit by deterring and resisting oncoming threats, sometimes successfully and sometimes not. 

In the early years of our project, we focussed only on flavour. It was only later that we began to question where flavours come from. And then realized that in selecting for wild flavours we were also selecting for trees with higher levels of phytochemicals to contribute flavours. These trees would also have higher resilience qualities and require less care and feeding than eating apple trees.

On a sliding scale of care and feeding, it could be argued the trees we’ve selected for their wild qualities are wilder than their eating apple producing relatives.

 

 

Wildness can be cherished and carried forward

A third major difference between our test orchards and those created by European settlers is the wider environmental context in which these test orchards grow and were grown. 

European settlers brought seeds. To the best of our knowledge, before European settlers arrived there was but a single native species of tiny apple in our part of this continent, the Malus coronaria. This means that any work done by pollinators of the Malus family was limited to blossoms of coronaria and blossoms of seedlings grown from seeds brought by Europeans. We should also keep in mind, though, that in describing the diversity of apple family trees at that time, we are missing important information from Indigenous communities. We are missing stories of their histories with trees in the apple family.

In contrast to test orchards in settler times, pollinators now have a much different experience. Biodiversity of apple family trees has increased dramatically during the hundreds of years of eating apple production on this continent. Years and years and years of people tossing apple cores out of car windows. Of seedlings growing, mixing, creating new fruits and new blossoms for pollinators. 

The diversity of Malus trees is now so extensive that treating our test orchard as if it existed in isolation from its larger environment would be a serious error. Our test orchards alone are not an isolated mini-source of origin. They become a new mini-source of origin in conjunction with apple trees grown from seeds in forests, in abandoned orchards, and along roadsides. Apple trees that have no care or feeding at all.

We and our test orchard are merely directing attention to the broader change that has taken place in our biological environment. 

In producing Pomarium Renaissance, we’re offering a different way to value wildness by linking it back to humans. We’re taking a step back from aesthetic value of wildness and from moral injunctions to preserve wildness for altruistic reasons. Instead, we’re suggesting that, in the support of biodiversity, wildness has an immediate benefit to humans and to human survival.

 

Growing wild trees in an orchard

We had already started planting test orchards on our farm when in 1998, Michael Pollan considered how "domestication" shows itself in "our knack for marrying the fruits of nature to the desires of culture", how domestication of apple trees has been "overdone" to the detriment of being able to grow healthy apples commercially without significant human intervention, and the need to "cultivate" wildness in order to make commercial apples more resistant to diseases and pests and less dependent on humans. 

He concluded that there is a solution:

"In the best of all possible worlds, we'd be preserving the wild apples' habitat in the Kazakh wilderness. In the next best world, though, we'd preserve the quality of wildness itself, something on which it turns out even domestication depends."

and lastly...

"Luckily for us, wildness can be cultivated, can thrive even in the straight lines and right angles of an apple orchard." (http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/breaking-ground-the-call-of-the-wild-apple/)

In reconnecting humans and tiny apples with their wild flavours, we tilt our heads with a nod of respect toward Kazakhstan and the Tian Shan Mountains, the source of origin of all apples. Bringing the lesson home, here we create a space for wild apple trees to do their thing whether they are located in the wild or in orchards.

Pomarium Renaissance brings the quality of wildness to the market in the form of an exquisitely complex taste experience. A small-batch, crafted juice that requires no additional assistance from supplemental flavours, colours, or sweeteners. Or—from another perspective—biodiversity doing its best to be appealing to humans.

 

 

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