Some of you may be familiar with the work of UK author Robert MacFarlane, whose books and essays on the natural world and our interactions with it (Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, etc) have been international best-sellers. This morning I tripped across an essay from a few years ago, about a trip to the ancestral home of the domesticated apple, in Kazakhstan's Tien Shan mountains. MacFarlane himself didn't take that trip, it was his friend and fellow writer Roger Deakin. Deakin died of cancer almost 20 years ago, and MacFarlane frames an excerpt from Deakin's book about his journey with personal reflections on their relationship.
It's fascinating food history re the emergence of the domesticated apple, and pretty fair travel/food writing in Deakin's recounting of the trip. I found it well worth the read, and thought many of you might enjoy it as well (as someone who was born and raised in apple-rearing country, and gets through 7-10 pounds of apples a week, it was especially resonant for me).
https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/east-to-eden/
Those of you with an interest in history and archaeology may also want to Google some of the recent excavations that have happened in the Tien Shan mountains, which hosted some substantial trading and agricultural centers going back to several millennia BCE.
