Wild Apples, Wild Bees

New Years recipes and greetings.

From Wild Honey Bees by Ingo Arndt

From In Berkeley by Robert Pinsky

L'shana tovah u'metukah!

O. Happy New Year. I am not Jewish. I sometimes wish I were. The part I especially wish for is to be part of a community that recognizes that an attention to food shows that ritual and meaning are here on earth and among the stuff of living. History on your plate, on the tip of your tongue.

Up North beside the escarpment the wind fallen wild apples have rolled to the side of the path insect-scarred and dimpled into tiny green and pink fists daring me to try them. Some of them are sweet and sour and some are as bitter as bark. I love those trees gnarled even more than their fruits hunched into the landscape freckled with lichen spouting leaves and branches at angles out beyond shape or logic. Unruly. I wrote about making feral apple leaf ink a few years ago but now I’m thinking of the cidery golden smell of apples warm and rotting in the sun yellow jackets waking up hungry for their sugar in the fall. A kind of garden of Eden. And what is wild anyway? For bees (according to a recent article in the New Yorker) its the domesticated ones that are in trouble because we’ve put them in bee condos and overmedicated them and chose their queen and kept them overly clean. Meanwhile the wild honeybees left to their own devices seem to be thriving in the forests. Apples also kind of problematize human definitions of wild—so that even the most cultivated grocery store apple is full of seeds ready to grow off in some barely recognizable direction. Here, working and looking out the window I feel between seasons. Mostly beyond words. But bees and apples seem a fitting pair to reset the year into some not yet imaginable future.

—JL

In the Colour Lab Today: Uses for Honey and Apples in the world of natural colour.