For the Record: "What Is the World’s Actual Lowest Hanging Fruit?"
From Pacific Standard:
A linguist and top pomologists attempt to
answer what should be a simple inquiry. Oddly enough, the answer brings a
complicated tale of devil strawberries, insurance companies, inferior
fruit, and the messy line between literal and metaphorical
interpretation.
It is the uncouth phrase of mid-level
managers and meddling consultants: “Let’s pick the low-hanging fruit.”
OK, sure, whatever you say boss.
But unless you live on a orchard, your encounters with real
low-hanging fruit don’t actually come too often. Low-hanging fruit seem
to be everywhere, and really nowhere at all.
Should you use a metaphorical phrase without fully considering
the literal specimens themselves or understanding the depths of its
meaning?
The seeds of this question were planted a couple of months ago within
the confines of our senior editor’s office, a space we often repair to
in the afternoons to discuss media and other miscellany that would never
reach a formal staff editorial meeting. Around that time, the Awl had published the personal account of
man who claimed to have not consumed fruit for the first 26 years of
his life. We were incredulous, but nonetheless intrigued. We were
discussing this when we noticed an unidentifiable citrus fruit lying on
the shelf of Ryan O’Hanlon’s bookcase. It was too small to be an orange
and too round to be a lemon, Nick Jackson, our digital
director, remembers. Its hue was strange as well.
Fruit was on the shelf, fruit was also on the Internet, and it was
certainly on the mind. It was a near-perfect confluence of events. And
then, as if a ripened apple fell from the sky, it happened. A Newtonian
moment, if there ever was one. “What is the lowest hanging fruit?” There were chuckles. No one knew.
Of all the low-hanging fruit in the world, is there one variety
that hangs the lowest? Is there a fruit out there, so low and so easy to
pick, that it should take on some kind of ultimate idiomatic credence?
It seems like a simple enough query, but would there be a simple
answer? And how might we even frame the question or judge the result? Is
it in measurement from a human’s reach or the ground? Are bush fruits
fair game? Does low-hanging fruit just pertain to the lowest individual
fruit on a single tree? We’d need to call in experts. In exploring the
physical truths, we might learn something about what the metaphor really
means.
I promised my colleagues I’d set forth on this curious intellectual
quest. And now, I think, I have settled upon a complicated, but very
fruitful, conclusion.
IT BECAME QUICKLY APPARENT that this effort would not bear low-hanging fruit.
I contacted eight prominent pomologists. Perhaps somewhat flummoxed
by the absurdity or cheekiness of the inquiry, only two responded. But
they both had similar conclusions.
According to preeminent fruit expert David Karp, a researcher at
University of California-Riverside who’s so knowledgeable about fruit
varieties and distinguished in locating new ones that he’s been referred to by the New Yorker
as “The Fruit Detective,” there are three ways to define
fruit: botanically, culinarily, and horticulturally. Selecting which
lens we use for the search would be crucial.
Botanically wouldn’t be the right one because much of what is
classified as fruit in that area isn’t consumed by humans. “There’s
things that squirrels eat that you and I wouldn’t eat, like acorns and
stuff like that, right?” Karp says. The lowest of the botanical fruits
are part of an extremely rare form of reproduction known as geocarpy, in
which fruits grow or ripen underground. Of those, peanuts, actually,
would be the most widely known. But culinarily, no one would ever
consider peanuts fruit. And besides, they don’t really hang per se.
However, the culinary perspective can muddy the precision of our search
too. There are items in our supermarket aisles that are considered
fruits that pomologists would scoff at. “I’m on the board of the
American Pomological Society and when I featured some melons in our
tasting, everybody looked down their nose at me,” Karp says. “‘Those are
not melons; they’re actually classified with vegetables
horticulturally.’”
Horticulturally is probably the way to go. If we reflect on the
meaning of the phrase, it would make sense to consult the perspective of
those who actually study the growth and harvesting of fruit.
What hangs lowest to the ground? Strawberries, Karp says. But there
is a clear caveat here. “If you ever talk to a strawberry harvester,
it’s known as the devil’s fruit because it’s hell to bend
down—it really is back-breaking labor,” Karp cautions. And this is where
the metaphorical begins to bleed into the literal. “It’s not ‘How low
can you go?’ from the picker’s point of view in terms of convenience,”
Karp adds. “It’s being at easy-to-grasp level, which depends on the
height of the human but you know that would be like three to seven feet
for your standard five-and-a-half or six-foot human.” And then, Karp
begins to talk about the linguistic origins of the phrase. Low-hanging
fruit, classically, was in reference to its position on a tree....MORE