Some Words

The girlfriend came home from Iowa today with two “grapples,” apples that have been bred to smell and taste like artificial grape flavor.

The wonders of modern technology.

Some school in the area of her home town signed on for a grant program that has their elementary school at the forefront of testing exotic fruit experiments. The remainders make it to the store.

Now, I have no idea if this was a GMO, or just a breeding accident that someone realized tasted like fakey grape. I don’t really care. All I know is that it made me uncomfortable. I felt old. Some things just shouldn’t be done. The fact that these two apples made the entire dining room reek of jolly rancher only exacerbated my fear.

But, remembering that all good technology is used to piss off old people, I decided to soldier in and taste the damn thing.

Really, I have to wonder about the thing. It doesn’t really taste like grapes, or even fake grapes, when you bite in. Mostly you get apple flavor, something close to a honeycrisp, maybe a braeburn. Hidden somewhere in the front of the flavor is grape jolly rancher flavor. I don’t know how they do it, but it’s like when you looked at crystal pepsi and it tasted different. I’m not sure I would have tasted anything, if I hadn’t been told this was a grapple.

So, really there is only one use for these things. Here’s how you get the most out of a grapple.

1) Find a grapple and some form of powerful hallucinogen.

2) Drug a friend.

3) When your friend is high, feed him the grapple. Don’t tell him that it’s been engineered to taste like that. Tell him that an army of tiny gnomes, carrying miniature grape jolly rancher candies, rubs the apple down before each bite. If he looks fast enough, tell him, he can see them rush in just before the apple reaches his mouth.

Science at work folks. We are at the forefront of a brave new world, where we take real food, and make it taste like fake food. The children at the school, I hear, were fans of this apple. Who can blame them? It tastes like what they know.