Lately it seems like the hottest fashion trend for fall 2014 has little to do with clothes and everything to do with apples. With our weekend Instagram and Facebook feeds chock-full with pictures of celebs and our stylish, crafty friends (usually with a kid or two in tow) swarming Upstate orchards, apple picking has officially become the New Yorkers’ pastime for 2014. And once something becomes a must-do thing for New Yorkers, a backlash is inevitable. And here it is.
I get that we New Yorkers are inherently snobs, so it makes sense to take something pretty basic—the most basic thing, really, and reclaim it as some kind of hip/cute/artisanal/insert Brooklyn-friendly adjective-here cultural thing. The lowly apple, the PBR of fruit, is about as simple and inoffensive as fruit gets, and picking them off the tree (or off the ground) is about as easy and low commitment as being outdoorsy gets. And with thousands of apple varieties out there, many with wacky, old-timey names like the Knobby Russet, Pitmaston Pineapple, and Newtown Pippin, New York apple snobbery is inevitable. Just saying those names makes bearded men and bescarved women squeal with delight.
And because Instagram and Tumblr are things, we want everyone to know just how folksy, rootsy, and real we can be. Never mind that we probably bought some apples on Fresh Direct for $3.49 last week. This week we’re going to be rustic! We’re bravely trekking north into the Hudson Valley like our suburban-moving forefathers in our trusty Zipcars, armed only with our iPhones and braving traffic jams, bridge tolls, and diners that may not even serve brunch just to pick apples, documenting the whole trip for the historical record. If anything should happen to us in the wild, thankfully we’ll have Instagrammed a dozen photos so our friends and family know that we went out being real.
Maybe I’m just immune to it. I grew up Upstate in a town where there were three apple farms. We worked at them for minimum wage during the summers, and got sick of picking apples (and being perpetually sunburned) pretty fast. They were pretty to drive by, and the apples were cheap from the roadside fruit stands, but mostly they were reserved for boring elementary school field trips, awkward first dates, and a place to take kids while babysitting. There was never anything glamorous to stepping through rotten apples and outrunning angry bees then. Is there now? If you want real and rustic, give yourselves a challenge! Stomp some grapes. Harvest beeswax. Wrangle some cattle. Apple picking? C’mon. Too easy. Weekend trips are fun, apples are delicious, and it is nice to get out of the City for a while—we can all agree on that. But c’mon, guys, let’s tone the whole apple thing down on the Interwebs, okay?![]()
The writer James Derek Sapienza, taking a shot at apples.
I get that we New Yorkers are inherently snobs, so it makes sense to take something pretty basic—the most basic thing, really, and reclaim it as some kind of hip/cute/artisanal/insert Brooklyn-friendly adjective-here cultural thing. The lowly apple, the PBR of fruit, is about as simple and inoffensive as fruit gets, and picking them off the tree (or off the ground) is about as easy and low commitment as being outdoorsy gets. And with thousands of apple varieties out there, many with wacky, old-timey names like the Knobby Russet, Pitmaston Pineapple, and Newtown Pippin, New York apple snobbery is inevitable. Just saying those names makes bearded men and bescarved women squeal with delight.
And because Instagram and Tumblr are things, we want everyone to know just how folksy, rootsy, and real we can be. Never mind that we probably bought some apples on Fresh Direct for $3.49 last week. This week we’re going to be rustic! We’re bravely trekking north into the Hudson Valley like our suburban-moving forefathers in our trusty Zipcars, armed only with our iPhones and braving traffic jams, bridge tolls, and diners that may not even serve brunch just to pick apples, documenting the whole trip for the historical record. If anything should happen to us in the wild, thankfully we’ll have Instagrammed a dozen photos so our friends and family know that we went out being real.
Maybe I’m just immune to it. I grew up Upstate in a town where there were three apple farms. We worked at them for minimum wage during the summers, and got sick of picking apples (and being perpetually sunburned) pretty fast. They were pretty to drive by, and the apples were cheap from the roadside fruit stands, but mostly they were reserved for boring elementary school field trips, awkward first dates, and a place to take kids while babysitting. There was never anything glamorous to stepping through rotten apples and outrunning angry bees then. Is there now? If you want real and rustic, give yourselves a challenge! Stomp some grapes. Harvest beeswax. Wrangle some cattle. Apple picking? C’mon. Too easy. Weekend trips are fun, apples are delicious, and it is nice to get out of the City for a while—we can all agree on that. But c’mon, guys, let’s tone the whole apple thing down on the Interwebs, okay?
The writer James Derek Sapienza, taking a shot at apples.