Over the years I have amassed my share of fruit picking memories–vines bursting with blackberries, beetles tunneling through strawberry patches, prickly peaches from my grandmother’s tree that survives amid Beijing smog. Yes, there is something very engaging about gathering and consuming your own produce. But the missing link in my past fruit pursuits has always been understanding the science behind the fruit, the experimentation done by researchers and farmers to streamline the process or yield the largest harvest.

We followed our tour guide through a grassy corridor between rows of closely planted, rod thin apple trees, heaving with fruit. He turned to us,  started giving the tour spiel, and almost every fact he mentioned completely threw off my assumptions about growing apples. It certainly made me realize that the process involves much more planning and science that I once thought. For example, I (very ignorantly, in retrospect) thought that you could just plant the seed of an apple and a tree would grow and you would have an apple tree. Of course it is not that simple. If you plant an apple seed, it will grow into a different fruit from the original apple the seed came from. This fact alone raised my admiration for apple farmers ten fold, for dealing with such a complicated fruit. Also, I had believed that every apple on the same tree must be the same quality apple. In reality, apples that receive the most sunlight are the best quality and are sold for eating, the ones hidden at the bottom of the tree are more likely to be processed into other apple products like cider. I had a lot to learn.

All of the tour was wonderfully informative and a little hands on (we got to pick apples of course), an experience I would recommend to anyone. The best part was after we had been walking in the hot sun around the orchards, we were lead to the apple storage room, a huge, chilled room stocked with wooden crates of apples piled twenty feet high. It was cool and refreshing and it smelled divinely of the sweet, crisp essence of apple, ‘like a yankee candle’ a friend mused. If only I could bottle up that scent and extract it whenever I need a little reminder to appreciate the hardworking people who study and grow the food that we all too often take for granted.