The Apple Detective

The article at Mother Jones is titled Why Your Supermarket Only Sells 5 Kinds of Apples, but it barely touches on that question (the answer seems to be "because agribusiness"). It's really about John Bunker and his quest to cultivate heritage apple varieties before they are lost forever. See, apples are hard to breed. If you want more apples like the ones on a certain tree, you need to clone it by grafting.


Bunker is an apple detective, who looks for such old fruit-bearing trees in order to preserve their genes by grafting. Read about his work, and the history of apple cultivation in America. Link  -via Boing Boing

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Very important work, not just apples but the origin of many species of plants we grow now are going to extinct. We have the current phenotype that's suitable for conditions that are happening right now but the parents of those phenotypes are more suitable for cultivating strains for changing conditions. We might have to start that process all over again some day in the very near future, we need those "original" DNA strains to be well preserved and not our interpretation of that organism, which is "right here, right now" suitable variety.
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