This Technicality episode is brought to you by my book, Behold This Compost!
Check it out you guys I can sponsor my own video!
How cool is that?
This is the story of the Newtown Pippin: the most important apple you’ve never heard
of.
The Newtown Pippin is known as one of America’s oldest apples, and it tastes so good that
it actually played a significant role in eighteenth and nineteenth century politics and diplomacy.
*takes a bite of the apple*
Hey guys, I’m here, let’s get technical.
When I first tried the Newtown Pippin around a year ago, it instantly became my favourite
apple.
Its clean, highly aromatic flavor, a blend of pine, citrus and walnut that somehow epitomizes
apple, has an ideal balance of sweetness and acidity and a complex, lingering aftertaste.
At least, that’s how pomologist David Karp described it.
I wanted to put this apple to the test, so I gave it to a bunch of my friends to see
their reaction.
Cevi this is the first time you’re trying a Newtown Pippin; let me know what you think.
Holy crap!
This is super good.
Oh woah yeah that... that is really good.
This actually is a good apple.
I was kinda doubtful when you said this was the best apple in the world,
but I kinda believe it.
How do you think this ranks, in terms of apples?
Like, top 5?
It is in the upper quartile of apples I’ve eaten.
More emotion?
*laughing*
I don’t like apples very much, but this is a good apple.
This is an apple I would absolutely buy in a store, I would recommend this apple to a
friend, I give this apple 9 apples out of apple.
*laughing* Sweet thank you!
To understand what makes this apple so great, we have to go back to when it was first discovered.
The year is 1720.
The place is Newtown, New York.
And the person is Gershom Moore.
Gershom owned an eighty-acre apple orchard which was gifted to his family in the mid-1600s
after one of his ancestors facilitated the purchase of Newtown from local Native Americans.
Woohoo!
Paying for land!
Novel concept in early America.
One day, he ate an apple from one of his trees and was astounded to find it was far more
delicious than any apple he had ever eaten before.
He quickly named the apple after the city it was grown in and began spreading the word.
But he ran into a problem.
Apples are pretty sneaky fruits.
You might think that if you were to plant a seed from a Newtown Pippin, you’d get
a tree that makes more Newtown Pippins.
But that’s not true.
If you plant a seed from a certain apple, you’ll get a totally new, never-before-seen
variety of apple because apples are something biologists call hybrids.
What are those?
To show you an example, here’s my friend Patch from the YouTube channel TierZoo to
talk about bears.
Organisms that are close enough together on the tree of life can produce viable offspring.
Usually when we talk about two organisms mating, we are talking about two organisms of the
same species, which is the smallest major unit of taxonomy.
If we expand out from there, we reach a bit of a grey area of biology, where usually organisms
can’t mate with each other.
But sometimes, particularly if their ancestors split into two separate groups relatively
recently, they’ll still be able to mate and produce offspring.
For example, lions and tigers can mate, and produce what’s called a Liger.
Now, because lions and tigers have been separate species for millions of years, the offspring
they produce when they mate is usually pretty unhealthy, and on top of that, it cannot reproduce
itself, so there’s no possibility of the Liger becoming its own species.
However, Polar Bears and Grizzly Bears diverged only about 150,000 years ago, and so they’re
still genetically similar enough to produce healthy, fertile offspring.
The offspring is a hybrid, with no official name, although the canadian wildlife authorities
have been calling it the “Nanulak” a fusion of the Inuit names for polar bear (nanuk)
and grizzly bear (aklak).
Ok, now imagine a scenario where there are tons of different species of bears that were
genetically similar enough to mate and create hybrids.
Those hybrids mate, and create more hybrids which don’t really look like their parents,
much less their grandparents.
Now repeat that for many, many generations, and it would be no surprise that the offspring
look nothing like their parents.
That’s exactly what’s going on with apples.
Each apple seed contains a unique genetic lineage, so when it germinates, the chance
that the new apple tree expresses the exact same characteristics as the parents is so
low, it’s practically impossible.
So here’s the problem: if you can’t just plant the seed, how do you make more of the
same apple?
Well, you have to use a process called grafting.
For instance, check out this Newtown Pippin tree.
Now, you might be thinking “why does he keep a Newtown Pippin tree in his studio?”
Grafting involves combining cambium from two plants so those plants can grow together.
Cambium is a type of plant tissue which produces undifferentiated cells, or cells that have
not yet developed into a specific type of cell.
Exposing the cambium and binding two plants allows them to fuse together.
The plant used in the bottom half of the grafted plant is called the rootstock, and the plant
used in the top half — you know, the part that produces fruit — is called the scion.
By merging a scion from the Newtown Pippin and a rootstock from some other plant, farmers
could create a Newtown Pippin tree and reproduce the apple.
You can even see here on the tree the place where the rootstock and the scion come together.
There are 4 crucial components of a successful graft.
The scion and the rootstock should be as genetically similar as possible, as tightly fastened together
as possible, in a stage where they’re capable of responding to the wound by producing callus,
and cared for once grafted, which includes making sure there’s enough moisture.
Let’s plant this.
*clap*
Gershom Moore harnessed the power of grafting and sold scions of the Newtown Pippin.
It quickly swept the nation, which was especially impressive considering it was the 18th Century
and the only things that swept the nation back then were stuff like the First Great
Awakening and smallpox.
Thomas Walker, a soldier for the British in the Seven Years War, introduced the Newtown
Pippin to the South after he lost a battle in 1755 in modern-day Pittsburgh.
Upon losing, Walker grabbed as many scions of the Newtown Pippin as he could and brought
them back to his farm in Albemarle County, Virginia (right next to Charlottesville).
Turns out: the soil in Albemarle County was incredible for Newtown Pippin trees.
Rich and loamy, it produced larger and sweeter pippins than the ones in New York.
As a matter of fact, that’s why Newtown Pippins are also sometimes called Albemarle
Pippins.
And get this: when Thomas Jefferson’s father passed away in 1757, Thomas Walker was appointed
to be then eleven-year-old Thomas Jefferson’s guardian.
Walker introduced Jefferson to the Newtown Pippin, and Jefferson fell in love.
At 170 trees, he grew more Newtown Pippins at Monticello than any other
variety of apples.
When Jefferson lived in Paris serving as America’s ambassador to France (or Minister to France
as it was called at the time), he wrote a letter to James Madison in which he complained,
“[the French] have no apples here to compare with our Newtown Pippin.”
From there, many famous figures in early American became big Newtown Pippin fans.
George Washington grew Newtown Pippins at Mount Vernon.
Benjamin Franklin was introduced to the Newtown Pippin when he was in London in 1759.
Naturally, Franklin loved the apple and began sharing it with his friends, all of whom loved
it as well and wanted more.
England tried to import a scion of the Newtown Pippin, but its climate proved challenging
for the pippin to grow, so people had to resort to importing individual Newtown Pippins from
America.
Unsurprisingly, this made the apples very expensive, and they became a symbol of wealth
and decadence.
This whole event is known as the First Pippin Mania in England.
Yes, you read that correctly: the First Pippin Mania.
The Second Pippin Mania happened in 1838.
England had recently implemented a tariff on imported apples in the hopes of catalyzing
the small apple industry they did have.
However, when Andrew Stevenson (America’s ambassador to Great Britain at the time) gave
a basket of Newtown Pippins to Queen Victoria as a gift, Queen Victoria — then only eighteen
years old — immediately lifted the tariff upon tasting the apples.
Andrew Stevenson’s wife, Sally Coles Stevenson, later wrote that the Newtown Pippins were,
“...eaten and praised by royal lips and swallowed by many aristocratic throats.”
Shortly after, Newtown Pippins became popular once again, selling for three times more than
the average apple.
People even had to be cautious of fake Newtown Pippins; some shady sellers would call similar-looking
apples Newtown Pippins and sell them for a lot of money at markets in London.
The Newtown Pippin was the Supreme of apples.
Sadly, the Great Depression hit Newtown Pippin growers hard.
Many east coast orchards switched to easier to grow apples, and the Newtown Pippin faded
from America’s east coast.
However, it’s not a sad ending for our beloved apple.
Long before the Depression, in the 1850s, the Newtown Pippin began to make its way out
west.
Newtown Pippin trees popped up in Watsonville, a city that’s about 90 miles southeast of
San Francisco.
The weather in Watsonville is perfect for Newtown Pippins; Watsonville has a long growing
season, a moderate climate, and plenty of coastal fog which protects the apples from
intense sun.
By 1920, 12,000 acres of Newtown Pippins dominated Watsonville, and many immigrants from Dalmatia
(a region in Croatia) moved to Watsonville to become apple farmers.
In fact, to get the Newtown Pippins for this video, my friend Chris and I took a road trip
down to an orchard in Watsonville.
CHRIS: I don’t eat many apples, but when I do, I only eat Newtown Pippins.
*laughing*
Today, you won’t find any Newtown Pippins in a grocery store.
Newtown Pippins are russeting apples, which means this light brown appears at the top
of every apple.
Thus, despite their superior taste, Granny Smith tends to fill the role of “green apple”
because it’s bigger and has fewer imperfections, so Granny Smiths are widely preferred by both
produce sellers and consumers.
Nonetheless, the Newtown Pippin still lives on.
Notably, Martinelli's (a popular high-end apple juice and cider company) buys 85% of
the Newtown Pippins grown in the Watsonville region, and about half of Martinelli's juice
is made up of Newtown Pippins.
Martinelli’s pays over $200 a ton for Newtown Pippins — significantly higher than the
going rate for juice apples — in order to ensure farmers don’t replace their Newtown
Pippin trees with more profitable alternatives.
In 2013, the New York City Council made the Newtown Pippin the official apple of NYC,
and like 15 organizations have been planting hundreds of Newtown Pippin trees around the
city.
Today, the neighborhood of Newtown has been renamed to Elmhurst, and the land that used
to be Gershom Moore’s apple orchard is now home to a public park.
If you liked this story, it originally came from my book, “Behold This Compost: How
City-Wide Compost Programs Work and Why We Need Them Now More Than Ever.”
I spent like a year writing this book, and I’m so so proud of it.
Did you know that 40% of food in the US — or around 1,500 calories per person per day — goes
uneaten.
That’s over 87 million Big Macs worth of calories daily, which is enough to feed the
entirety of Germany, Canada, and Australia combined.
Food waste is a massive problem not just here, but everywhere in the world, and compost is
its brilliant solution.
If you’re interested in climate change or sustainability or environmental policy and
logistics, this is the book for you.
It’s part science, part personal memoir, and it’s filled with everything from fascinating
anecdotes to really nice, full-color photos.
I announced it a couple months ago, and the reception has been incredible.
I’ve gotten DMs from people saying they’ve started composting, and they’ve recommended
this book to family and friends and teachers.
So, if you wanna pick up a copy yourself and support the channel, go to beholdthiscompost.com
and pick up a copy for only $15.
Thank you!
Thanks to my patrons on Patreon, I’m able to do things like buy an actual Newtown Pippin
tree and include it in the video, so if you wanna help make things like that possible,
you can support me in my mission to create high-quality educational content at patreon.com/technicality.
Bunch of awesome perks over there, including having your name on screen right now, like
these awesome people, thank you!
How’s everyone doing?
With the whole coronavirus quarantine?
The entire Bay Area is currently on lockdown and I’ve got classes via Zoom, so hopefully
now I’ve got a bit more free time to work on projects.
I’ve also got some exciting life updates coming up soon (vis-à-vis college) so follow
me on Instagram (@alexunickel) for that and other good content.
Thank you for watching, DFTBA, and explore on.