yen, the botany of desire, and the story of cultivated apples:

[excerpt] ...Pollan quotes Emerson: "man would be more solitary, less friended, less supported, if the land yielded only the useful maize and potato, [and] withheld this ornamental and social fruit". He quotes a speaker to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in 1885: "The desire of the Puritan, distant from help and struggling for bare existitence, to add the Pippin to his slender list of comforts, and the sour 'syder' to cheer his heart and liver, must be considered a fortunate circumstance". First found in the Kazakh forests. Each apple contains enough genetic material to be entirely unlike its parent, even more unlike than human beings are; but we have deliberately sweetened our apples (through grafting) and the legend of Johnny Appleseed.