The Trouble with Pears

Pears could be described as the apple’s ugly stepsister. Well, with its wide bottom and long, slender tapering neck, pears are actually pretty hot looking. Maybe a better way to describe a pear is the apple’s unpopular stepsister – In the States we consume over 45 lbs. of apples per person annually: Pears, 5ish. Granted 25 lbs of that apple consumption comes in the form of apple juice, even if you haven’t sat down with a box of juice lately, apple juice is the 'natural' sweetener found in 100s of products.

Apples are readily available year around, usually for cheaper and have a more consistent flavor, still pears should do better. A pome fruit like the apple, originating in roughly the same geographic area, pears have never been as notable as their round counterpart. Eve may have tempted Adam with an apple but pears don’t appear in the bible. Greeks had knowledge of the pear but only wrote of its medicinal values. The Romans liked it plenty, but they esteemed all fresh fruit and veg. Pears survived in Northern Europe orchards for centuries after the collapse of the empire and eventually making the jump across the Atlantic with new world settlers from England.

Different scholars make the argument we should think of the folk hero as Johnny Applecider; pre-revolution US was cider crazy. (And ale and rum and corn whiskey crazy – the oft-cited founding fathers liked to drink; quaffing 5 times more hard alcohol and 20 times more ‘small’ alcohol like beer and cider than their modern counterparts, take that Don Draper). The act of turning pears into an alcoholic beverage is to perry. It wasn’t unheard of to press pears into cider in Colonial times, but while English orchards may have been productive, transplanting seeds and stock to the US with longer, hotter summers and frigid winters in New England created an environment where trees produced less fruit and smaller pears with less juice. For a whole bunch of reasons from preservation, to taxes, to lack of currency – things that could be readily fermented had more value in the early US.

Modernity, with its hard currency, its rules and policies against paying workers with alcohol, cold storage, transportation systems and varieties improved for shelf-life should have leveled the pome playing field but collectively we eat 16 lbs. of fresh apples every year compared to the 3 lbs. of fresh pears we go through annually. A few years ago Washington State (Go Cougars), tested a sample group of self-described pear lovers to get a handle on the future pear market: Demographically - older men with more education than the general population, who don’t plan on purchasing pears before they go to the store are the subgroup most likely to buy pears. Not really a great group to hang your growth on – Marketing options are limited to the slogan "Love your fruit like grandpa does".

The average participant of the survey valued sweetness and juiciness in pears above other attributes – 2 things that are hard to tell before you bite into a piece of fruit. People, and these are self-identified pear lovers, also wanted to their fruit to be ripe within 2 days of purchase. The fruit's most ardent supporters are a bit fickle and aging but pear consumption grows by about 1% a year. Pears are in season, we’ll have more about what to do with them later in the week, but for now do your part and buy some.