| Grappling
with man-made food |
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Call me finicky, but I was immediately suspicious of the fruit called a Grapple. Perhaps I am missing the appeal of eating a food whose name means ”to come to terms with.” Although “grapple” has its roots in physical confrontations like wrestling, and also meaning as a noun for certain kinds of hooks and buckets, it’s a word I’ve encountered mainly in book reviews and discussions. Most grappling done in my world is Man Against Ideas. What’s next? A cheese called Deconstruct? A breakfast bread called Limn? To be sure, the label on the four-apple plastic carton I bought at Busch’s for $4.99 includes the instruction “Pronounce as grapple,” with a long A, hidden under the price label. I can picture the founders of Get Fit Foods, the company behind the Grapple, having a eureka moment when they hit on the name. Pesky definitions aside, Grapple is a cunning little combo of “grape” and “apple,” and that’s what the Grapple is, kinda. Get Fit takes a perfectly good Fuji apple, a sweet, golden-flecked, firm-fleshed, juicy beauty, and according to the website, “bathes” it in elixir, or essence, or something, of Concord grape. (Concord grapes, for those who don’t know, are the dark purple ones that tastes like “grape” flavor. Ever wonder why grape Bubblicious tastes nothing like the seedless green or red table grapes that you buy at the grocery store? It’s because it tastes like Concord grape. It’s the end of the season now, but you still might be able to find some around; if you have never tried them they will change your attitude towards grapes.) The Get Fit bath infuses the apple with grape flavor. So basically, a grapple is an apple soaked in grape juice then priced at approximately three times the price of your standard Fuji apple. Maybe the name isn’t so inappropriate after all, because I found myself grappling with the idea of a grape-apple hybrid. I like grapes. I like apples. But unlike true hybrid fruit, the tangor, for instance, a hybrid of tangerine and orange that results in an easier-to-peel orange, or the pluot, which is cross between a plum and an apricot that produces a plum without a tart skin, the grapple does away with no unseemly characteristics of either the grape or the apple. In fact, I am hard-pressed to find undesirable traits in either fruit. And unlike tangelos and pluots, the Grapple is not a new fruit at all, rather one taste masked by another. But how a grape-flavored apple improves upon an apple-flavored apple flummuxes me. Do kids adore Concord grapes with such abandon that they will devour anything with traces of their flavor? If so, are Grapples just the first step towards grape-flavored turkey breast, carrot sticks, string cheese? Or is it something the founders of Get Fit have against the apple, leading them to believe that any other flavor would be more appealing than that of a Fuji? Will they soon be bathing Granny Smiths in chai tea or eau de vanilla steamer or pomagranate juice? There is a modern urge to make one food taste like another, to improve upon nature. This might make sense—broccoli could taste like Fruit Loops, say, and kids would eat broccoli for breakfast, and that would be swell. Utterly unpalatable nutrition bars can be rendered somewhat edible by the introduction of certain clues that make you associate a mass of tan, chewy carbohydrates with “peanut butter and chocolate,” and when you are in an unfortunate situation that requires your reliance on such concoctions for nutrition, even a hint of peanut putter and chocolate is appreciated. And these make some kind of sense. But some things don’t make sense, like “gourmet” popcorn, with its ersatz pina colada or blueberry flavoring, or the creepily convincing potato chips you find in London that are lamb or shrimp flavoed. In these snacks, novelty trumps the true delight in simple, fresh popcorn or a fried and salted slice of potato. Grapples
fall into the latter category. Less “grape-flavored”
than “grape-suggestive,” Grapples smell like grapes,
taste grapish on the surface, but basically are still an apple.
Pure appleness trumps taste tampering, which may be disappointing
for those who were really excited by the idea of obliterating apple
flavor but, for me, was reassuring. A2P
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