Today, reserves throughout the Tian Shan mountain range keep the last wild apple forests growing safely—except from foraging bears, who don’t care at all about botanical history.
We tend to think of the apple as a fruit that grows everywhere, but all domestic apples can be traced back to Almaty, Kazakhstan. That ancestor still grows wild there in the Tian Shan mountains. But how did the apple become popular in cuisines around the world?