Emily Kwong

And his job is basically to preserve that genetic diversity of apples.

In fact, the U.S.

Department of Agriculture has an entire orchard just dedicated to that preservation.

And Ben gave me a tour.

Nice.

Emily, this orchard was huge, like 5,000 trees, and each one of them is totally unique.

Some of the apples were huge and round and green, and some of them were tiny, so cute, and so red that they were almost purple.

I've never seen so many different types of apples.

This work has such longevity, like it is about looking to the future of apple making.

Yeah, it's like this huge archive, like a Noah's Ark of apples from all over the world.

That one was really bad.

But it could carry some trait.

Yeah.

These apples, Fen says their genes could hold the key to the apples of the future.

We just don't know yet.

We'll find out.

50, 60 years from now, we'll all be eating whatever you just spit out, Hannah.

Thank you so much for this recording.

Thank you.

This episode was reported by Hannah Chin and produced by Rachel Carlson.