One of my friends lives somewhere in the great Northwest, and I was noticing a picture of some fresh apples over on her FaceBook, apples she had picked from her own apple trees. Man, what I wouldn't do for some fresh apples! I live in central Texas where most self-respecting apples won't grow, and you can't buy good apples anymore.

It is one of the most annoying paradoxes of our post-modern age, that. And it's all because apples are too good for their own good.

You see, under the proper conditions of temperature and humidity an apple will keep practically forever. And the state of agricultural production being what it is, they usually harvest far more apples than can be eaten by 300 million apple-pie-eating Americans of all stripes, and still send half of them to New Zealand. Keep 'em in big, dark warehouses, they do. On FIFO gravity shelves, where the oldest apples on earth are loaded into trucks every morning and shipped to supermarkets around the country.

 Now, it's September 22, the first day of autumn, or so. And I know--because I've been around the block a few times and because I can see fresh-picked apples on my friend's FaceBook-- that someone is reading the Cider House Rules this very minute and apples are being harvested everywhere from Portland, to Chicago, to New York. But if I were to stop in at my local HEB and try to find a crisp, new Fuji or Pink Lady, I would be sorely disappointed. You'd find a Democrat in Sun City before you'd find a North American apple in a Texas grocery store in September. 

Right now,  old H.E. Butt is selling all Chilean apples all the time. Apples his warehouseman threw on a gravity shelf six months ago in that 39 degree, 25% humidity warehouse. Today, that same guy, standing there in his fruit-stained jacket, is throwing boxes of the most Delicious apples Americans can grow on the back end of those shelves  where they won't be seen or heard from again, for the better part of a year.

If you want to call me an America hater just because I'm not satisfied eating stale apples any day of the year, go ahead. I've been called worse. But what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his soul? Likewise, what effing good is it to spend your whole life eating last year's apples?

I just won't do it.

Used to be you could tell how fresh an apple was by twisting the stem. If you twisted and twisted and twisted and the stem still hadn't snapped, then you were dealing with a fresh apple. If the stem was dry and brittle and broke off right away, then that apple was too old, and probably from another hemisphere. At some point the producers got wise to this trick and started taking the stems off, or otherwise making them untwistably short. But now they put those annoying little plastic labels on every apple (how much does that cost?)  so it's still easy as Hell to see that I'm buying Chilean apples in September and Michigan apples in March.

Most fruits don't keep as long as apples. You can't play these sorts of childish games with bananas or cherries. They'll ripen up and be ready for the compost heap inside of a week. But all those beautiful apples, serving out their 6-month sentence in some dark Wal-Mart warehouse... it's a shame, a travesty, and a monumental waste of freshness!

I'd rather have an apple at the height of its flavor and freshness three or four months a year than a tasteless, underripe apple that has been kept under house arrest for the better part of a year.

 In fact, I won't settle for less.