My go-to apple is Honeycrisp. They consistently deliver an ideal apple experience. As far as I can tell, other varieties are in the grocery only for baking, saucing, or to fill up space to justify the produce department setting aside a display bunker just for apples.

I’m joking, but only to poke fun at myself. I’m swarmed by biases like the one above. Apples might be trivial. But these “pre-filtered” perspectives keep showing up, and often in connection with much more consequential subjects, such as relationships, morality, finances, or thermostat settings. It’s at the point where I doubt nearly all the convictions my younger self held. I’m told this is a common experience among my age peers, so I keep moving through the fog.

Anyhow, recently while playing Fortnite with a friend, I felt like having a snack. I grabbed an apple.

When you play games like Fortnite along with friends, everyone wears a headset with a microphone, so that you can talk to each other. (Talking to your friends is the main point of the activity, but that’s another story.)

With my microphone on, my friend clearly heard that Honeycrisp apple crunch. Wikipedia helps illustrate what he heard:

It has larger cells than most apple cultivars, a trait which is correlated with juiciness, as theoretically a higher number of cells rupture when bitten, releasing more juice in the mouth.

“What kind of apple is that?”

“Honeycrisp, of course,” I said.

“My wife won’t let me buy Honeycrisps. They’re too expensive. I get Granny Smith.”

That caught me by surprise. I never even shopped around for apples. Eons ago, in the bewildering innocence of my youth, I’d buy Red Delicious apples because of the word “delicious”. They’re not delicious. They’re more like “Red Okay”.

Granny Smith, being tart and slightly mealy, are great for pies. Their potential comes out when combined with a cup of brown sugar, and a stick of butter. They’re the apples my grandma specified when she taught my cousins and me her apple pie recipe. They are literally grandma apples. (Her pies were perfect, and she was one of the most beautiful souls I’ve ever met.)

About ten years ago, someone told me I should be getting Honeycrisp apples. This had immediate appeal, as the words “honey” and “crisp” are more compelling than the word “delicious”. I got myself a bag of them at the grocery next door, and was all-in after one bite.

Ten years later, my friend had unwittingly pointed out that I’d acquired a high-end apple habit. Does my preference in apples point to yet another shortcoming in my character? I checked out “profligate apples” in French using Google Translate (French word sounds are cool). This was a great idea, because that produced the translation “pommes débauchées”. I don’t know what that would mean to someone who speaks French, but being an American living in Canada, my strategy for French is, of course, to transliterate it back to English. I’m amused by the idea of apples being so intensely pleasant that enjoying them could be debaucherous.

I don’t yet know where I am on the question of apples, and their role in revealing moral excess. Well, I do partly know. I’m going to keep buying Honeycrisp apples.

But it has me thinking about ways in which I get used to things without always considering their cost. How do I get off my mental train tracks, and really see what’s going on around me? How can I uncover and learn from what other people are experiencing? How can I start to notice and appreciate the choices I’m making all the time, when I’m not even aware that I’m making them?

(Photo by Adam Bouse on Unsplash)