Supersize Me—Organic Style

"Super-apple" ©2011 Barbara DaCosta

If an apple a day keeps the doctor away, and apples have more than doubled in size since that adage was coined, what are we to do? Eat a half apple a day or a whole one?
Even organic apples have become supersized. Here are two apples that I bought on my quest for my one-apple-a-day snack. No wonder I barely had room for dinner after consuming the hefty one on the left! By my calculations, at close to three-quarters of a pound, it had three times the volume of the smaller one, which was a "standard" lunch-box-sized apple.
"Organic" once meant getting something safe and scrumptious that might not be cosmetically perfect. The main thing was that it was not plumped out with fertilizers or hormones. Now, however, organics have become big business, and with that has come the new standard shown here: perfectly shaped, perfectly sized, perfectly colored, and, as with the apple on the left, as perfectly super-sized as any hormonally plumped out, genetically manipulated, chemically sprayed commercial apple might be.