The Fruit Hunters Read online

  Though Mango Nectarines taste like regular nectarines, their novelty commands a higher price. Their flavor is better than another Ito Packing Co.’s innovation, the Honeydew Nectarine. Its green-tinged white skin certainly bears a resemblance to the exterior of a melon, which raises logistical concerns for the neophyte: namely, will the rind be edible? Of course it is, because it’s simply a white-skinned nectarine with a trumped-up nom de plum.

  Such titular hybridization is a double-edged seed, as it both attracts new customers, but also leads to alienation when the duplicity is revealed. Once shoppers catch on, the possibility of a backlash could relegate the fruit back to obscurity. Economists have noted the consumer tendency to be “punitive” when they buy a disappointing fruit: they won’t buy any more of that fruit for a while, and in some cases they give up on that variety forever. “If you eat a bad cherry, it can take you six weeks to go back and buy another one,” says Snyder. “By then the season’s over. Too bad, try to get them next year.” In the short term, however, flashy fruits-du-jour like Strawmatoes and Mango Nectarines—or Grapples—can be counted on to generate profits.

  “I know they’re unlocking the DNA of the apple right now,” Snyder says, leaning back in his chair. “Everybody wants to use gene machines. If you take a sweet gene and a red gene and you put ’em together—you got a sweet red something. Does that scare you? I had a cauliflower-cheese soup the other day. I was just talking about it at the store, about how it’s like a Grapple. I don’t like cauliflower by itself, but once you add cheese … There are a lot of things that really go well together. Cousin Todd says it best: ‘chocolate and peanut butter.’”

  C&O Nursery subscribes to a number of trade magazines, both of the fruit-growing variety and of the chemical-flavoring variety: Food Technology, Produce Business, Good Fruit Grower, Food Chemical News. Their diverging editorials seem to have intersected in Snyder’s mind. “You wanna have a Sudafed apple in the future? I’m not gonna close any doors,” he says. “Look at nanotechnology. We don’t know where it’s gonna go.”

  In recent years, the advent of presliced apples has been a boon to growers. Studies have shown that 65 percent of consumers would rather purchase sliced apples than whole apples. Plastic baggies now sell in enormous quantities at grocery chains and fast-food outlets like McDonald’s (which purchased 54 million pounds of Galas in 2005 to make Apple Dippers). Produced in factories around the nation, the fruits are mechanically cored, sliced with scalpel-sharp steel blades, sorted on assembly lines by workers wearing head-to-toe protective outfits and dredged in an invisible, flavorless powder made of ascorbic acid, calcium salts and vitamin C called NatureSeal. (NatureSeal has also become available for domestic use, meaning apples can now be cored, sliced and doused in the comfort of our homes. “It works wonders,” says a sales agent.)

  Conforming to the sterility requirements of processed food laws isn’t simple. The packages can harbor listeria, salmonella and toxic microflora causing diarrhea, mucosal invasion and carcinogenesis. Outbreaks of bacterial contamination have already forced sliced-apple recalls. New chemical additives such as PQSL 2.0 are being developed to neutralize all traces of life on the apple slices.

  Grapples have also been available presliced in baggies, but Snyder says they may not be for long. C&O Nursery recently stopped working with their initial marketing partner, Get Fit Foods (who own proprietary slicing technology). Before handing me a press release, Snyder blacks their name out, first with a pen, then with a Sharpie, saying, “That’s how much I like them.”

  “We came across divergent interests,” is how Get Fit Foods coowner Blair McHaney explains their separation, noting that there is a “consumer groundswell” against the Grapple’s use of synthetic flavoring on a natural product.

  Get Fit Foods recently filed for patents on presliced apples containing natural flavors. “I think the mind is more accepting when it’s natural flavoring,” says McHaney. Apple Sweets, as McHaney’s product is called, have been tested with forty different so-called natural flavors, such as caramel, root beer and wild berry, and are already being launched in supermarkets.

  Posterity will determine whether flavored fruits are here to stay. For now, as the Grapple’s sales testify, shoppers have cottoned to the novelty factor. Point three in a bullet-point document Gary Snyder printed up to prepare for our interview claims that a high percentage of people say it is the best apple they have ever eaten. “It’s the only apple that gets fan mail,” he says. “We get tens of thousands of e-mails. We’re trying to keep it cool, to not toot our own horn—but we’re going global. It’s a smoker!”

  IN THE REALM of flavored fruits, the Grapple’s only analogue seems to be the maraschino cherry. “I like to tell people a maraschino is the nutritional equivalent of a LifeSaver,” says Josh Reynolds, vice president of Gray & Company, the world’s biggest maraschino cherry manufacturer.

  Once upon a time, a marasca was a bitter cherry that grew wild in Croatia’s Dalmatian mountains. The kernels were crushed and fermented to make maraschino liqueur, in which whole marasca cherries were preserved. It became a fad to have maraschino cherries with cocktails in New York in the early 1900s. Their quality has steadily decreased with each new manufacturing innovation. Maraschinos today are more like chemical-addled receptacles than actual fruits. Producing them involves bleaching low-grade cherries, stoning, sweetening and flavoring them, packing them in a syrup, and dying them—usually neon red, although Eola Cherry Co. also sells shocking blue, green and pink maraschinos.

  The dye used until the 1990s, Red Dye #3, is now banned by the FDA. Research linked the color to cancerous tumors in rats. These days, maraschinos contain Red Dye #40, a pigment found in Doritos, Pop-Tarts and other foods. (Parents of hyperactive children claim that the dye causes tantrums.)

  Snyder wrinkles his nose when I bring up maraschinos: “That’s a bleached-out way to dump bad cherries.” But when I ask him about the Grapple’s safety, he reaches into his pocket. “A cell phone is a good example. What’s a cell phone going to do to me? We don’t know.” He holds his phone to his ear questioningly, as though he might hear an answer or, perhaps, the ocean.

  Part of what makes Snyder’s contrivance so compelling is the secrecy with which he discusses it. His answers are peppered with talk of pending patents, levels of confidentiality and intellectual property issues. “We’re in experimental lockdown,” he says. “I have to tiptoe around what I’m saying and hem and haw about what information is released. My partners and I have signed over one hundred fifty NDAs [nondisclosure agreements] on this.”

  When I first contacted Snyder, he said, “No way on God’s green earth will I let you into the plant.” Only after a series of phone calls, and my offer to sign an NDA (which never materialized), did Snyder finally consent to an interview. I asked him about the process of making Grapples. “There’s no reason to go down that road of showing how it’s made,” he said, his evasiveness igniting my curiosity. “It’s far better to just do a happy story on how this is a way to keep kids healthy and to help with childhood obesity. Every time we tell a journalist that that’s the story they should do, they’re very happy doing that story.”

  Snyder said he would give me the “Reader’s Digest version” when I arrived. “It’s like asking how chocolate chip cookies are made,” he said. “You blend ’em up, throw ’em in the oven and bingo, out comes a cookie. That’s how Grapple works. We aren’t going to give out the recipe.”

  One of Snyder’s peculiarities is a tendency to make exaggerated gulps, or the sound of a gasket blowing off steam, especially when faced with a difficult question. During our first phone conversation, he told me “point blank” that he highly doubted I would learn anything by visiting him in Wenatchee, punctuating the statement with a glottal thud. “But if you do get a blade of grass, then at least it’ll be something.”

  SET BACK FROM North Wenatchee Avenue, C&O Nursery’s office facade consists of a series of one-way mirrors. They ca
n see out, but you can’t see in. Non-transparency seems to be an architectural constant in Wenatchee: windowless gray fruit packing and storing facilities dot the area.

  The first thing I notice on Snyder’s desk is a half dozen peaches (labeled Vergil and C-1XO) in a temperature-controlled container. Starting the conversation, I casually ask about them as we sit down in his office.

  “Oh, you can’t look at those,” he says, covering them with his hands. “Those are new varieties.”

  This first exchange sets the tone. Later on, I ask if their lab is located in the building.

  He stares at me. “Maybe.”

  “Can we go into the lab?”

  “Nah.”

  Early in the interview, Snyder’s cousin Todd Snyder comes into the room to listen in on our discussion. Shortly thereafter, Gary Snyder lets it slip that, “The trick is getting the lenticels to open up to get the flavor into the apples.” When I inquire further about lenticels, the cousins exchange nervous glances.

  Lenticels are the little specks on the surface of apples and pears. They are actually pores through which pome fruits breathe. Thoreau, in his manuscript Wild Fruits, described seeing heaven in the dots on the surface of a pear: “(As on the sky by night) the whole firmament with its stars shines forth.” The Snyder family saw something else in those tiny openings: a big opportunity.

  The blogosphere froths with attempts at explaining how Grapples are made. Some claim to have “noticed that the skin was perforated with multiple, almost invisible injection needle holes.” Snyder dismisses this notion, saying that puncturing apples would immediately render them defective. One chat room explanation of the process alleges that the fruit is first immersed in a gelatinous substance, filled with a bacterial grape-flavor gene, and then rinsed with a concentrated liquid derived from Prozac.

  When I read this to Snyder, he starts tapping his foot impatiently. Upon hearing the part about the antidepressants, he laughs uproariously. “That’s why it’s the happy apple!” he bellows, his face reddening.

  “I never wanted to let anyone know anything about this,” he says. “I like leaving it open. We used to get orders for Grapple trees. It’s so much better when you let your brain go.”

  When I ask him to explain the process, he says his legal counsel has advised him to only discuss what’s on the Grapple’s website. It contains scant information. Several times over the course of our interview, Snyder responds to my questions by holding up his finger. Swiveling in his chair, he moves over to his computer, whistling a little tune. He then prints out a webpage showing an image of a smiling apple diving into purple water and hands it to me with an exaggerated smile. “That’s the information that the public can have access to.”

  DOING SOME OF my own research into artificial grape flavor, I learn that the scent of Concord grapes has a chemical name: methyl anthranilate (MA). Naturally occurring in Concord grapes, MA is the substance that makes them smell the way they do. Every time we eat those grapes, organic MA molecules invade our olfactory glands.

  MA can also be synthetically produced, resulting in artificial grape smell and flavor. Chemically constructed MA molecules are called “nature identicals.” Flavorist lore holds that a German scientist discovered the compound C8H9NO2 accidentally: when combining different chemicals, he was struck by the fragrance of grapes wafting from his Bunsen burners.

  MA extracted directly from grapes (in other words, natural grape flavor) is more expensive than synthetic MA obtained through industrial pathways. PMC Specialties Group is the only producer of synthetic grape flavor in the United States. At PMC’s chemical plant in Cincinnati, methyl anthranilate molecules are vacuum-distilled in a four-story refinery whose gleaming chrome pipes recall an El Lissitzky painting.

  Used to enliven everything from candy to perfume, MA is in all products containing artificial grape flavor. MA is in purple Kool-Aid, grape soda, bubble gum and many other foods. Categorized by the FDA as GRAS (Generally Regarded as Safe), it has been used for decades without any evident signs of toxicity in humans—besides causing serious, albeit temporary, damage if it gets in our eyes.

  While googling MA, I come across something as seemingly random as that German scientist’s discovery: a website for Bird Shield Repellent Corporation, a Washington outfit that markets a pesticidal formulation containing MA as its active ingredient. Grape-flavored pesticide? It doesn’t seem to make any sense.

  I call the owner, Fred Dunham, who tells me that birds loathe the smell of MA. “Our storage warehouse used to be so full of birds that they’d give people umbrellas so they wouldn’t get bombed from above,” says Dunham. “When we started storing methyl anthranilate in the warehouse, the birds disappeared.”

  I ask him if his product is a pesticide. “Anything that kills or repels is by definition a pesticide,” says Dunham. “So Bird Shield officially is a pesticide, even though it is nonlethal.” The same MA used as an ingredient in our foods is also used in this food-grade bird repellent. Bird Shield’s scent only lasts about a week, so numerous aerial sprayings are recommended throughout the growing season. It is used on a variety of crops, such as corn, sunflowers and rice. It is also used on certain apple crops.

  Such as?

  “Mainly Fujis and Galas.”

  Those are the two varieties used to make Grapples.

  Has Dunham heard of the Grapple? “Sure,” he replies. “They buy their methyl anthranilate from us. We make them their own formulation, which is, of course, confidential.”

  C&O has more than twenty fruit patents, starting with 1932’s Plant Patent #51 for the fuzzless Candoka Peach up to 2001’s PP #12098 for their striped Top Export Fuji Apples. The family’s latest patent, for “grape-flavored pome fruits,” is still pending, as anyone trolling the databases of the United States Patent & Trademark Office can see. Everything relating to the Grapple’s manufacture is contained in the various dockets of Patent Application #20050058758, filed by Gary Snyder.

  The documents describe how MA is absorbed through the lenticels. It turns out that MA acts like a solvent, seeping into the fruit’s interior when dipped in a 70 degree admixture. Large-scale treatment can incorporate a spray system mounted to a conveyor belt, but this purple rain method isn’t as effective as fully dunking the fruit in packing-line dip tanks. After drying, the flavored fruits are placed in refrigerated chambers where they retain the flavor for months. The smell is volatile and can dissipate rapidly if the apples aren’t stored in dark, cold places. This would explain the many online complaints that Grapples aren’t even redolent of grapes—they hadn’t been refrigerated. (The grape-scented papers Snyder gave me stopped giving off fumes after a week.)

  The flavoring admixture used in the patent application is an off-the-shelf solution of MA “marketed under the names of Bird Shield Bird Repellent, and Fruit Shield Repellent.” (Dunham’s company also manufactures Fruit Shield Repellent, which likewise contains MA as its sole active ingredient.)

  Item 0013 spells it out unequivocally: “For the present invention, the heretofore considered repellent effects of the methyl anthranilate are preserved for consumer enjoyment.”

  Yet when I call Snyder to clarify the use of artificial grape flavor in food-grade pesticides like Bird Shield, I get nowhere. “I know the road you’re going down,” he says. “See your word, ‘pesticide.’ I will not associate it down that road. It’s not associated, period. It’s a stop sign for me. I will not let it go to press.” I can see why he opposes the word pesticide; nevertheless, MA is a flavoring agent that isn’t harmful to humans. It just happens to repel birds, which makes it a pesticide.

  As secretive as he may be, it’s hard to dispute Snyder’s contention that a Grapple is better than a deep-fried Twinkie. “I really think it will do good for mankind,” he says. “It can help people. If you make a buck it’s a bonus. If you don’t make a buck you can’t do it.” The freakiness of his invention, while reminiscent of Dr. Frankenstein, owes less to the original than to the ethos
of Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (wherein Gene Wilder’s character insists “It’s pronounced Fronken-schteen”).

  “This has brought more smiles to people’s faces than everything I’ve ever done,” beams Snyder. “Beats the heck out of a comedy club.” When asked if he has ever worked at a comedy club, he says he hasn’t—although correspondences from C&O Nursery are likely to sign off with “Have a grape day.”

  Other flavors are in the pipeline. Snyder, who claims to have “lockjaw” on the subject, nonetheless says we can expect some “berry delicious apples” soon. “You can read whatever you want into that,” he adds, with an exaggerated wink and a slap on the knee. “When you’re in a supermarket, it smells gross when you walk into the chemicals aisle. It smells gross when you walk into the tire aisle. But when you walk over to Grapples,” he says, flashing a thumbs-up and rippling a zephyr of sickly sweet grape odor, “it’s killer.”

  “THE FUTURE OF my hometown,” narrates Guy Evans in Broken Limbs, a documentary about Wenatchee’s apple farmers, “is very much in question.” As the city’s orchards are being turned into subdivisions, big-box stores or land for other crops, local agriculture commissions are starting to promote the fact that they now yield more potatoes per acre than Idaho. (Even though Idaho still produces the most potatoes.) The Wenatchee World newspaper’s slogan is equally convoluted: “Published in the Apple Capital of the World and the Buckle of the Powerbelt of the Great Northwest.”