Apples are a-peeling

The apple kind of has a bad reputation. The Evil Queen used it to poison Snow White. A snake used it to ruin humanity. I’m sure Hitler ate an apple once in his life.

But it’s not all bad. According to legend, Isaac Newton came up with his theories on gravity after an apple fell and hit his head. Johnny Appleseed spread peace and love by planting apple trees across America before hippies in the 60’s ever did.

Liam will probably go on and on about how horrible apples are. You know how droll he gets with his repetition and run-on sentences. He’ll slander apples in a very ungentlemanly manner, while wrongfully venerating oranges. That doesn’t matter, though, because Liam is not as ept at judging fronts as yours truly .

I don’t think the apple deserves all the hate it gets. Apples really are amazing. Definitely in my top five favorite fruits. People like to say that apples are evil because of their role in the Bible, but I feel the need to dispel this fiction.

Let’s look at what the King James Version of the Bible says in Genesis 3:6: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.”

Notice the wording — “fruit.” Not an apple. Not a pomegranate. Not some other cockamamie fruit.

The KJV of the Bible is the most popular, and though it’s just one version, other translations also use the world “fruit.” Even if it was an apple, the apple isn’t the evil thing. It wasn’t the apple that ruined humanity. The snake tempted Eve to eat from the tree. It looks to me like it wasn’t the apple’s fault, if there even was one.

It might’ve been an orange. We just don’t know. Whoever originally wrote the Book of Genesis didn’t say “apple” or “orange.” He said “fruit.” For all we know, it might have been some unknown, extinct kind.

Now, enough with the Bible study. Let’s get down to business. Oranges aren’t that good. They’re mediocre, at best. Apples are way better. According to SFGate, in California (the nation’s second-greatest producer of oranges), it takes an orange tree 15 years to start producing fruit.

Almanac claims that apple trees take eight to ten years. You’ll have a fresh apple much faster than a crummy old orange. You can eat apples faster than you can eat oranges, and they’re way easier to eat.

Sure, you don’t really have to wash oranges, but you still have to peel them. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen someone struggle to peel an orange, I’d have a decent amount of spending money.

Apples are much more versatile. They don’t need to be peeled– just wipe them off and take a bite. Or you could peel them for cooking. Either way, they’re still delicious.

Orange peels aren’t that useful outside of zesting and compost, and it’s not like you constantly have a zester or a compost pile with you. You’ll always have an orange peel left over, but that’s not the case with apples.

Usually when you eat apples, you’ve stuck with the core. “What am I supposed to do with this,” you cry out. “It’s making my hand sticky and getting all brown.” What you need to do is consider your options. You could just throw the core away. You can use it for compost, if you want to “save the world” and all that. If you’re a real tough, hardy chap, just eat it.

You may argue that apple seeds contain arsenic, which is true. According to Snopes, apple seeds “contain amygdalin, a cyanide and sugar compound that degrades into hydrogen cyanide when metabolized… Luckily for those fond of their Granny Smiths, the body can detoxify cyanide in small doses, and the number of apple seeds it takes to pack a lethal punch is so huge that even the most dedicated of apple eaters is extremely unlikely to ingest enough [seeds] to cause any harm.”

Yeah, apple seeds have cyanide. There’s also fluoride in water, and mercury in vaccines. They don’t hurt you, and neither do some tiny little seeds. Just one less reason to not eat the whole apple.

In fact, The Atlantic suggests that Americans could be wasting a lot of money by just eating the outside of the apple. In James Hamlin’s article “Apples Cores Are a Myth,” he claims that we waste “30 percent of our apples at $1.30 per pound.” That’s a whole lot of apple. Americans end up wasting “about $42 wasted per person per year—which is $13.2 billion annually,” Hamlin said. According to Business Insider, that’s more than Bill Gates and Warren Buffet make in a year. Just in case you haven’t noticed, that’s a lot of money.

It’s actually common in eastern European countries to devour the entire apple, and I see no reason why Americans shouldn’t follow the example of former-Soviet nations and up their apple consumption while they’re at it.