Apple by Erika Janik

Author:Erika Janik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

National Apple Week Association float in front of the Pan American Union, Washington, dc, 1926. Note the promotion of the apple as healthy in the banner. National Apple Week began in 1904 to increase consumer awareness and interest in apples.

Even so, apples were still more often drunk than eaten, especially in rural England and colonial America. At a time when water quality was poor and milk unpasteurized, cider was an inexpensive, safe drink that nearly anyone could – and did – make. Cider was safe even for children, who were given watered-down cider as a nutritious, wholesome beverage.

That view of cider’s healthful benefits changed radically in the nineteenth century with the American Temperance movement, however. As America moved away from agriculture and toward urbanization, many people became alarmed by the changes they saw around them: extreme poverty, disease and crime, among others. Temperance supporters came to believe that the cause of most social problems could be found in alcohol. Some farmers cut down their apple trees, while others simply stopped producing alcoholic beverages altogether in favour of sweet apple juice. Temperance created a market for this non-alcoholic juice, further encouraged by followers such as the Reverend Sylvester Graham, Presbyterian preacher, Temperance lecturer and self-styled diet guru. Graham claimed that ‘fruits, vegetables and nuts make for temperance’, that food was more healthful the less it was cooked and asked rhetorically, ‘what luxuries can compare with the luscious peach, or the juicy apple?’ As Americans began to see diet as not only the key to physical health but moral heath, the foundations of a modern health food movement were established.

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