SweeTango, a new hybrid of Honeycrisp and Zestar. Photograph by Grant Cornett

It was a humid afternoon in late September, the kind of weather that makes an apple feel slightly greasy to the touch. Outside Fairway, the supermarket on Broadway at Seventy-fourth Street that is a fixture of the Upper West Side, shoppers were hurrying to beat the rain. Moms were clutching the hands of small children in a post-school-day daze, while elderly ladies barrelled through the entrance wielding wheeled walkers and snarling, “Ex-CUSE me!”

Inside, in a claustrophobic produce aisle that was piled high with apples and musky with the scent of ripeness, stood twenty-eight-year-old Dan Glickberg, Fairway’s executive vice-president and the great-grandson of the store’s founder, Nathan Glickberg. He watched as his customers tried to decide among the twelve varieties of apples on display. There was a new apple in town, SweeTango, and Glickberg wanted his customers to know about it, but he wasn’t pushy. He wore the placid expression of a man who has heard every conceivable complaint and experienced every possible eccentricity when it comes to food.

An older woman with blond highlights approached.

“This is a great apple, Ma’am,” Glickberg said, and held up the newcomer. “Great apple,” he repeated, and smiled.

“I want to make strudel,” the woman said, in a German accent.

“Well, this is a fantastic eating apple. It’s crisp and it’s juicy.”

“But for strudel?”

“Golden Delicious would be good for strudel, Ma’am. But why don’t you take one of these to eat?”

He handed the apple to her. She looked it over, and then sniffed the calyx, the apple’s bottom. It was a large apple, but not supersized, like the Fujis down the aisle. It had sunburned shoulders, yellow sides, and a splash of green around the stem bowl, and it was freckled with “lenticels,” through which it was imperceptibly breathing. Like young Glickberg, the SweeTango was of fortunate lineage—its father was Zestar, which Fairway also had in stock, and its mother was the famous Honeycrisp, which Fairway would be getting a little later in the season.

The woman shrugged. “O.K., I will let you know,” she said, putting the apple into her cart.

“She will, too,” Glickberg said, watching her walk away.

This was SweeTango’s second fall in the city. In its débutante season, supplies were so limited that few New Yorkers got to taste it; this year, there were three times as many nationwide. Tweets from SweeTango’s Twitter account and posts on its Facebook page tracked the apple’s progress from Minnesota, where it was bred, to stores around the country. Like Honeycrisp, SweeTango has much larger cells than other apples, and when you bite into it the cells shatter, rather than cleaving along the cell walls, as is the case with most popular apples. The bursting of the cells fills your mouth with juice. Chunks of SweeTango snap off in your mouth with a loud cracking sound. Although a crisp texture is the single most prized quality in an apple—even more desirable than taste, according to one study—crispness is more a matter of acoustics than of mouthfeel. Vibrations pass along the lower jaw and set the cochlea trembling. Biting into a really crisp apple, one feels, in the words of Edward Bunyard, the author of “The Anatomy of Dessert,” “a certain joy in crashing through living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days.”

But, no matter how celebrated its parents, any new apple in the Big Apple is going to face a tough crowd.

“Have you tried SweeTango?” Glickberg asked another customer. “If you like a crisp apple, this one is good.”

“Too expensive,” the woman said. It was $2.99 a pound, which was a dollar more than the Gala and Fuji apples, but a lot less than the SweeTango was selling for online (twelve for thirty-eight dollars, on one site).

The next customer began filling a bag with them. “I just like the way they look,” she said.

Another woman stopped in front of SweeTango. “Now, I read about these new apples on the Web, and I think this was one of them.”

“Probably was.”

“What are they like?”

“Very crisp and very sweet.”

“Oh, good. My dogs will like them.”

Glickberg nodded.

“Well, we share them,” the woman went on. “I have four dogs.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I have to peel them for one. He doesn’t like the skin.”

Like every invention, SweeTango is both a work of individual genius and a product of its times. As a piece of intellectual property—branded, patented, and trademarked—it has more in common with the apple on my laptop than the one I used to carry in my lunchbox. Anyone can judge for himself how it tastes—very sweet, though saved from saccharine, in my opinion, by a lemony finish—but to appreciate what SweeTango represents, as a product and as a cultural construct, it helps to understand something about its antecedents. And since apples and humans go way back—Thoreau begins his essay “Wild Apples” by noting, “It is remarkable how closely the history of the Apple-tree is connected with that of man”—a little backstory is necessary.

Malus pumila, of the family Rosaceae and the tribe Pyreae, was domesticated some four thousand years ago, in the fruit forests of what is now southeastern Kazakhstan, near the city of Almaty. Frank Browning, the author of “Apples,” reports seeing apple trees growing up through cracks in the pavement there. The wild horses of the nearby steppe liked to eat apples, and could cover long distances, carrying the seeds in their guts. Apples travelled westward along trade routes, and show up in Persia around the time of Alexander the Great, and in Europe not long after; the Romans cultivated them widely. (The apple in the Garden of Eden was most likely a pomegranate, or possibly an orange.) The species came to the New World with the first European settlers, in the form of seeds, and the pioneers, as they pushed westward, took apples with them.

By the time of the Civil War, there were many kinds of apples growing across the United States, but most of them didn’t taste very good, and as a rule people didn’t eat them. Cider was cheaper to make than beer, and many settlers believed fermented drinks were safer than water. Everyone drank hard cider. President John Adams drank a tankard before breakfast. Babies drank it before going to bed. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Carry Nation took up her axe in the service of the temperance movement, she likely employed it on apple trees as well as saloons. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the apple had a serious public-relations problem.

The solution, as Michael Pollan relates in his book “The Botany of Desire,” was to promote the eating of apples as a healthy snack. J. T. Stinson, a fruit specialist, first used the phrase “An apple a day keeps the doctor away” at the St. Louis World’s Fair, in 1904. (He adapted the slogan from the traditional English proverb “An apple before going to bed keeps the doctor from earning his bread.”) Many cider-makers had long prized the chance seedlings, discovered in their fields and orchards, that yielded unexpectedly delectable eating apples. As the industry moved away from cider-making and toward table fruit, some of these apples were named, propagated by cloning—the method of grafting a piece of one tree onto the trunk of another, which produces fruit that is an exact genetic copy of the first tree’s—and promoted like pop stars. The Northeast had Jonathan, Esopus Spitzenburg, and Blue Pearmain (Thoreau’s favorite); the South claimed Winesap, Sally Gray, and Disharoon; the Midwest boasted Hawkeye and Detroit Red; and from the West came the Gravenstein and the Yellow Newtown Pippin. Their flavors were shaped by their respective climates—the shorter the growing season the tarter the apples tended to be.