Hey, hey, here we are in September. Apple season, possibly the best season. And I feel

fiercely devoted to my favorite apple, the pink lady. So tart, so tasty, excellent with a little

bit of sharp white cheddar cheese. Also, just such a good name for an apple.

Kind of a cool story behind the name, actually.

The horticulturist who developed the Pink Lady Apple apparently loved this novel called The Cruel See by Nicholas Montserrat.

And in the book, the protagonist indulges in a cocktail called Pink Lady.

So there you go. There are a lot of catchy apple names out there, Red Delicious, Granny Smith, Honeycrisp, and this fall, there's a new apple all around town

with possibly the flashiest name of them all. The Cosmic Crisp. So today we're bringing you a special collaboration with another

podcast called The Sporkful. If you haven't heard this show before, it is so good. They've won a James

Beard Award, and they use food as a lens to talk about science, history, race, culture,

and the ideal way to properly layer a PBBNJ. And this episode is all about

the cosmic crisp, how scientists developed it and how it got that flashy name. All right,

here's the sporkful. So basically, like, first you make the apples have sex, then you have to raise the kids.

Right. And then you've got to choose which kid you want to keep, and all the rest of them you just get rid of.

So that's when it becomes a little kind of, you know, you want to dissociate it from humans at that point.

This is the sporkful. It's not for foodies. It's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. You know, when you go to the grocery store, you see strawberries, blueberries, oranges. Most of the time, it's one kind of each, right? Yeah, maybe there are like two types of oranges. They have red and green grapes.

Apples? Apples are different. Red delicious, golden delicious, Granny Smith, Gala, Fuji, Honey Crisp.

The list goes on and on. So many apples. When I was a kid, we didn't have Honey Crisp. That's how old I am.

So where did that come from? How are new apples developed?

And what's wrong with the old ones?

That's what we're going to learn about today, because this fall, there's a new apple coming.

It's been 20 years in the making, and its launch will be the biggest in Apple history.

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