When the seasons start to change, I eagerly turn my attention to apples. Apple butter, apple cider, and any number of other delights await me, and I also make big batches of apple cider vinegar hoping to make enough to last me the year (and failing: I use a lot of vinegar).
I've been researching food and folklore a lot recently and apples are a fruitful (pun intended) starting point for an exploration of fruit in stories, because they are at the root of myths in many cultures. Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Wisdom and Immortality, golden apples appear in Greek, Roman, and Druidic mythology, among others, and references to apples and apple trees appear in the Iroquois creation story and in the Hindu Upanishads.
There are many types of actual apples too, a manifestation of our love of them: it's estimated that around 7,000 cultivars exist worldwide. Apples originally grew wild in Kazakhstan, and even today you can visit their ancestral forests, tucked in the Tian Shan mountain range that separates Kazakhstan from China. Even these wild trees have been cultivated to some extent, though not by us: As ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan says, the creatures that live in the forest gravitate towards the best tasting fruit, influencing the diversity of these wild forests and the fruit that is found there. In other words, wild creatures shaped our apple varieties first: We've just been building on their work since.
So why are we so fascinated with apples? The simple answer is that we don't have an answer, but there seems to be one possible reason: Apples were widespread and widely known across ancient Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. As with most domesticated plants, we can't pin down an exact date when apple cultivation began, but researchers think it was between 4,000-10,000 years ago (quite a wide range, but we take what we can get).
What's interesting, though, is that we have evidence of how apples moved between places: Different species of apples appear along the trade routes they were carried along, crossing with the local crabapple and other wild apple species that preceded them, thus giving us thousands of different apple species in the modern day. And giving our storytelling ancestors plenty to chew on.