‘Dad look at this,’ my nine-year-old daughter said to me in awe. Polite, silent, internalised groan. Was it Bindi Irwin on television again? Some new lyric she’d finally heard in a Taylor Swift song? No, in her hand was an apple.
‘It’s the perfect apple,’ she said as proudly as if she was the smug chicken that had laid a glorious double-yolker egg.
All week she had been picking apples from our apple tree which, being a youngster itself, is producing its first crop this summer. Sometimes she has been eating three or four in a row and she’s stuffing her lunch box full of them. The whole time I have been thinking she is a matyr for health – the victim of some new Department of Education good food campaign.The adults in the family are too wise to fall for the old pretty apple trick. We are all victims of post traumatic floury apple disorder, which manifests itself by spitting out mouthfuls of soggy tasteless fruit into the bin, uncontrolled swearing and flashbacks to the bill for how much that damned inedible bag of apples from the supermarket cost.
It is part of that spectrum of emotional disorders that also includes apricot head shaking syndrome. ‘No, I will not buy those tempting apricots at the supermarket, I must resist because if I come home with another bag of tasteless but expensive and beautiful fruit my wife, Prue, will divorce me.’
Still, so many times, in spite of the abuse, I have succumbed. I have looked at the shelf of apricots at the supermarket and my mouth starts to water, I pick an apricot up and before I know it I have greedily stuffed a bag full with a couple of kilograms, fooling myself that this time it will be different.
I come home and walk in the door and hold the bag of apricots aloft as if it is a leg of woolly mammoth I have butchered for dinner.
Prue says: ‘What the hell were you thinking?! You know they will taste crap.’
And, of course she is right. I have brought home a bag of orange things that taste like someone has forgotten to add the apricot part.
But even by the standards of the modern pretty apple my daughter was right about the gem she held in her palm. ‘It’s even got a bright green leaf growing out of it,’ she continued.
I held it in my hand and turned it around and round cynically. Sure it looked good and that leaf growing from the stalk was a nice aesthetic touch.
It had perfect clouds of red spread around its absolutely spherical waistline and the underlying green was enough to give the environmental movement renewed hope. You could almost understand how something that wondrous got humanity kicked out of Eden and inspired Isaac Newton to discover gravity.
But how many times have we all been fooled by the glorious piece of fruit that tastes like a chomp out of that famous Egyptian mummy, Tutankhamen?
It was my birthday. And my daughter was making an offering. ‘You should try it Dad.’
But I am done with apples. No matter how many doctors they keep away and how good they are for your constitution I swore off them years ago. Along with strawberries, tomatoes, nectarines and peaches.
Dig deep enough into our fruit bowl and there will always be some poor shop-bought apple that has slowly dried there for weeks and has the skin of a 102-year-old.
So my apple was placed in the fruit bowl, the scene of so many mass apple witherings, the epicentre of countless, thwarted vitamin C fantasies.
The day passed, my birthday was wrapping up, it was 10 pm. I stood in the kitchen and pondered my gifts – my flash new wallet, my new Johnny Cash dvd – and my attention was again grabbed by the present I had disdained, the sublime little apple in the fruit bowl.
I held it once more and decided to take a photo of it instead of eat it. But then on the spur of the moment I took a bite. ‘My God,’ I said to my wife. ‘This is beautiful.’
The skin was like a fine crust that disappeared in my mouth, the flesh of the fruit was as white as bleached paper and as crisp and juicy as a good potato. It was sweet beyond belief and I ate greedily, not stopping until all that was left was a core, stalk and leaf, which landed after a three-pointer throw with a satisfying little thud into our compost bin.
When you grow your own food you start to wonder what the hell is being done to the stuff we buy in supermarkets.
Who is behind the great flavour and texture theft of our fruit?
Prue got herself through uni by fruit picking across Victoria and she blames early harvesting, lengthy refrigeration and waxing as the main culprits in the crime against apples.
But I blame laziness – my own. Why has it taken me until I am in my forties to grow my own apple tree? It’s not rocket science, in fact since it was planted, so dismissive have I been of its worth, I have never given it a moment’s thought. But few homes are too small to grow one and so, at least for a few weeks a year, everyone should know the joys of a proper piece of fruit.