So, I was at Costco to buy a bag of those crispy, single-serve Gala apples, and the guy checking out my goods said, “An apple a day…”
I’m usually the one to initiate conversations with strangers; this was kind of new. I replied, “… keeps the doctor away. My mother would say that.”
“You know how that started, right?” he said.
Here I am thinking it’s something my mother got from her mother; the same way we were told carrots help your eyesight, because you’ve never seen a rabbit wearing glasses. “No,” I said.
He proceeded to tell a story about how an “Apple a day keeps the doctor away,” was marketing, because when Americans stopped making hard cider and switched to beer, there was a crash in the apple market. I know until there was public, sanitized water, residents of our great country kept a barrel of beer in the house and drank nothing else, because water was filled with runoff from livestock and spread cholera, among other deadly diseases. (This helped lead to Prohibition.)
What incredible news! I’ve been writing about food—and cider and beer—for 20-something years and never heard this before. “It must have been in the late 19th century,” I said. He was like, “Yeah.”
I waited in line for someone to check my receipt and walked to the parking lot. It didn’t make sense. Was Big Apple that organized then? What about Johnny Appleseed, the man I learned of in grammar school, who crossed our great nation planting apple trees? (For the full story, please consult Google; I don’t have the space here.) Was this like the way people didn’t eat corn, because it was considered cattle feed, but it’s now prized as a sweet summer treat? Maybe at the time, apples were good enough for cows and pigs but beneath the palates of antebellum United States.
At home, I googled the whole thing. And, of course, I found nothing to back up his claim. I did learn the “apple a day” rhyme is thought to have originated in Scotland, where it went: “Eat an apple on going to bed, and you’ll keep the doctor from earning his bread.” The whole thing was about not having to pay doctors?
(My family comes from Irish stock, and back in the day, this would be a prime opportunity to make fun of the Scots. I don’t know enough about this rivalry to land a punch line.)
Where am I going? To page 10 where we tell the story of spent grain, a by-product of making beer. Breweries soak barley, or malted barley, to extract flavor and sugar in order to ferment it. (Alcohol and carbon dioxide are the result of fermentation.)
Spent grain is past its usefulness for brewers; it’s wet, heavy and substantial and is a challenge to unload. Here’s where livestock come in; they love it. The Port City’s breweries have a whole system to get it to our farms and keep it out of landfills. It’s free, nutritious and delicious. Or so a cow told me.
You see where this is going: Sustainably minded home brewers and the kind of people who publish an Edible magazine want to eat it, too. Check page 14 for recipes. It also makes good dog treats!
This rolls into the story about Sealevel City Vegan Diner, which starts on page 20. The restaurant aggressively works to minimize waste. Kinda how I run my kitchen.
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This story originally appeared in the Summer 2024 issue.
