RENDERED 34: Granny Smith Apples

Where the Quaint Meets the Corporate

Mar 01, 2025

“A Good Ol’ Granny Smith.” The only apple I’ll willingly eat, preferably with a chunk of sharp cheddar cheese and some good bread. With a cup of black coffee, it is my ideal breakfast.

Lime green skin, tart flavor, crisp juicy crunch: what’s not to love about a Granny Smith apple? In my opinion, it is the Ideal Apple. And to its credit, it’s got a charming backstory.

There really was a Granny Smith: Maria Ann Smith, born in 1799 and raised in apple country, Sussex (southeast England). She was born into a farming family, and married herself a farmer husband.

In 1830, trouble reached the Smiths’ doorstep. That was the year of the Swing Riots: an uprising of farm laborers who were supremely pissed off about being underpaid, and losing work because of new agricultural machines. There were too many laborers and not enough work for everyone–this was a recipe for hunger, poor living conditions, righteous anger against landowners, and massive civil unrest.

To solve this problem, English authorities decided to use the tools at their disposal… by shipping off those poor laborers to their colonies abroad, Canada and Australia. Out of sight, out of mind!

That’s how Mrs. Smith and her family ended up in New South Wales, Australia, in 1838. Mr. Smith found fruit farm work just outside Sydney, and by the mid-1850’s, the Smiths had acquired their own farmland, where they established fruit orchards.

Legend has it, that Mrs. Smith picked up some Tasmanian-grown crabapples at the local market. She used them to make a pie, and threw the cores out the window. Those crabapples crossed with an existing apple variety, which created a unique new apple plant she discovered on her property in 1868, 2 years before her death. Local orchardists continued to plant and grow this new variety, named “Granny Smith’s seedlings.” It is now grown worldwide.

Mrs. Smith’s 5x-great-granddaughter is quoted in a BBC article: “Fruit can't be patented, and I often think how rich we could have been if it had have been different.”

It’s too bad the Smith family didn’t come into generational prosperity…but you actually can patent fruit. As long as it is an invention, not a naturally-occurring crossbred plant.

To that point: Dear Readers, when was the last time you bit into an apple and worried about it turning a yucky brown? Has the apple-browning issue deterred you from buying apples altogether? Who’s got the time to use lemon juice to stop a cut apple from browning in the fridge!

Well, never fear: a Canadian corporation has addressed this problem by developing new boutique apple varieties, genetically-engineered Arctic apples that are immune to browning.

Yay! Cut-up Arctic apples can be stored for weeks in the fridge! (Wrapped in plastic for freshness, of course.) Compare them to regular ol’ shitty apples that go brown within minutes after being sliced. Ugh! Right in the trash!

Arctic apples are a brand, with a registered trademark and a patent.

Arctic Granny Smiths are one of several varieties developed, grown, and processed by this one company. Today in select retailers, you can buy fresh Arctic Granny apple slices and dried apple snacks in neatly-packaged and precisely-measured shrink-wrapped packs. Branded as an “exceptional eating experience,” bioengineered to stop browning, developed to reduce food waste and increase apple consumption in the United States and beyond.

It is true that 133 billion pounds, or 38% of all food in the United States, is wasted, going uneaten or unsold: at homes, in restaurants and shops, on farms. But this problem exists in the dumpster fire of a food system which relies on hideous labor practices, and embarrassing inequity of access–in 2023, 13.5% (or 18 million) households in the United States experienced food insecurity.

…How exactly does the anti-browning private-equity apple help here?

Maybe it’s just me, but reading about these plastic-wrapped biohacked apples, trademarked and marketed to increase shareholder profit, while purporting to address real problems in the American food system, just chaps my ass. How deliciously, disingenuously corporate to create a boutique solution to an invented problem.

I wonder what Ms. Granny Smith would think of these hermetically-sealed bioengineered apple slices? An apple variety originally born as a serendipitous cross-breed with a crabapple, named after a farmer who was herself a victim of economic circumstance, who never reaped the rewards of her wildly delicious (and successful) green apples.

RENDERED: Illustrated Food History

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