Every other Friday, NHPR's Outside/In team answers one listener question about the natural world.
This week's question comes from Charles in La Verne, California.
"I like apples a lot. We buy three two-pound bags of apples a week. What are the odds that I eat apples from the same tree... Often? In my lifetime?”
Producer Marina Henke looked into it.
Marina Henke: After hearing this question I was ready to dive into our listener’s grocery store habits. Was he a Walmart guy? Maybe a regular at the farmers market? But that is what I would have done, had Charles not specified his preferred apple variety.
Charles: I eat a lot of Cosmic Crisp apples.
Marina Henke: Cosmic Crisps. A variety that is only grown in Washington state! Which means that even if Charles wanted to go to a local orchard and pluck two apples from the same tree . . . he couldn’t. I needed to talk to somebody in Washington.
Thiago Campbell: Yeah, so first off, I just want to say great choice picking Cosmic Crisp.
Marina Henke: This is Thiago Campbell, an educator on Washington State University’s Tree Fruit Extension Program and a fellow Cosmic Crisp lover. To cut to the chase, Thiago’s answer to this, honestly incredible, question is this: Unlikely, but not impossible. Could you ever prove it? Definitely not. The reason why stems from the winding path the average Cosmic Crisp apple must take to get from orchard to produce aisle.
Thiago Campbell: All the apples in the state and in the U.S. are harvested by hand at the moment. So that’s harvested from a person put into their picking bag and then that is placed into bins.
Marina Henke: These bins can hold around 900 pounds of apples.
Thiago Campbell: It's pretty big! Like you can sit probably at least five people in there.
Marina Henke: The size of these bins means that already at this point, apples from several trees are being mixed together. The bins then go to a packing house, where they arrive alongside apples from dozens of other orchards.
Thiago Campbell: And then they’re either stored in refrigerated air or they're stored under controlled atmosphere, which is just simply bringing down the oxygen and the carbon dioxide concentration in the room so that those fruits can be stored for longer times.
Marina Henke: During this time apples are still in their original bin. But when an order comes in . . .
Thiago Campbell: They’re put onto a packing line where they're washed, cleaned, they’re waxed or left unwaxed.
Marina Henke: This is when apples from the same trees start to go their separate ways. Multiple bins often get washed together. Then they’re spread out on a conveyor belt and dropped into the bags that you or I pick up at the store.
For the most part, packing houses do keep all the bins from one orchard together, for traceability purposes. But occasionally, especially if the fruit is being packed by size or grade, bins from entirely different orchards might get mixed up. In that case your apples are almost definitely not coming from the same tree.
So what does this all mean for Charles? Well, if during the bagging process, a packing house keeps all the bins from an orchard together, and if these bags are all bought and sold to the same distribution center, and then to the same grocery store, there is a chance a consumer could wind up eating an apple from the same tree. Especially if, like Charles, they’re buying multiple bags within one week, when a grocer is still restocking the aisles from the same big order.
But, that’s a lot of if’s. As to whether Charles might eat an apple from the same tree months apart? The odds are way smaller. Since grocery stores don’t place orders with orchards directly, they’re at the whims of whichever bins in whichever cold storage rooms are ready to go.
Thiago Campbell: It’s unlikely with the amount of trees we have and the amount of fruit that we produce.
Marina Henke: In case you’re wondering about that total number of Cosmic Crisp trees? It’s about 22 million. That . . . is a lot of apples.
If you’d like to submit a question to the Outside/In team, you can record it as a voice memo on your smartphone and send it to outsidein@nhpr.org. You can also leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER.Outside/In is a podcast! Subscribe wherever you get yours.
