As an apple addict, I average two or three daily. They keep me going between meals, provide a deliciously crunchy snack when I’m bored, and nicely mark the end of lunch (which I might otherwise be still nibbling well into mid-afternoon). I eat apples with fennel in green salads and I can’t get enough of them pan-fried and caramelised with sausages. Roast pork belly and apple sauce is a dish of seduction; as is tarte tatin, one of those classics that always gets a moan of gluttony out of friends.

It appears that I’m not alone in my apple addiction. In 2004 we bought about 9kg (20lb) of apples each in the UK. It seems that Eve picked the right fruit for temptation. They are packed with vitamins and minerals that have a wide range of properties: potassium, which helps you to maintain healthy blood pressure; soluble fibre for healthy digestion and to help lower cholesterol levels; and flavanoids to fight cancer. And they are a good source of vitamin C.

Though the apple is not as quintessentially British as I once assumed (if Adam ate one all that time ago, they must have been big in the Middle East), growing them is something at which our climate excels. It was the Romans who first brought them across the Channel after cultivating varieties at home. They started a craze. In 1640 a British horticulturist had noted 60 varieties; in Victorian England that number had risen to 6,000.

Sadly, many varieties have disappeared. Although I can still happily chomp into the pink-stained flesh of a Discovery (it’s lovely sliced into a cocktail of whisky and apple juice), many of our wonderful varieties are dying out. The Ashmead’s Kernel, which grows near my parents’ home in Gloucestershire, is another fine specimen with beautifully scented flesh and firm crunch. However, its fate, along with hundreds of other rare specimens, looks bleak in the face of increasing pressure on growers to produce greater yields of tasteless, uniform crops.

There are about 2,500 varieties registered in the National Fruit Collection in Kent (www. webvalley.co.uk/brogdale/), which means that we have already lost a few thousand others. When you go to the shops you can generally buy only three varieties, even in the height of our late September/October apple season, and quite often they lack flavour. Most of the apples we eat are imported from overseas; indeed it was reported last week that the Chinese were beginning to plant English apple varieties for export to Britain. Just think of the air miles.

Being such an enthusiastic apple-eater, I’ve often wondered how much good they were doing me. So I spoke to Dave Kaspar, an apple producer and chairman of the Gloucestershire Orchard Group, about the varying levels of nutrients in rare-breed apples compared with the ubiquitous supermarket kind. I had heard that varieties such as Barnet’s Beauty and Blenheim Orange contain between two to five times as much vitamin C as their more common relatives. Perhaps, if they contain that much more vitamin C, they’ll contain more of all the other goodies? Kaspar explained that rare-breed orchards, which are fast disappearing from our landscape, are classified by the Government as “unimproved grassland”, which means that they are rarely touched by pesticides and fertilisers. With the land left to its own devices, wild flowers, insects, bird life and small mammals live alongside each other in these ecosystems, while the fruit flourishes in this mostly organic environment. The orchards have never been intensively farmed so the soil is still rich in nutrients. As a result, these orchards produce fruit that is very good for you.

For me there is only one conclusion to draw: we should be eating more rare-breed apples. National Apple Day is on October 21 and in celebration, Common Ground, the environmental lobbying group, is helping to organise festivals, apple pickings and tastings. And I’m going to be in the thick of it. Get out there, too, and discover new favourites, and ask for them at your local supermarket, greengrocer or box scheme. Afterwards, treat your friends and family with this fast, delicious apple cake (see panel), which uses mostly honey instead of sugar, and ground almonds instead of flour.

For National Apple Day details,

visit www.commonground.org.uk

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