Strange fruit… meet the ‘grapple’..
Just when you thought that a nice juicy piece of fruit was a natural healthy snack (ok, ignore the pesticides and intensive hybridisation for a few seconds)… so, just when you thought that an apple was nature’s perfectly packaged piece of goodness, along came the ‘grapple’.
This is a piece of fruit that looks very much like an apple, but it smells strongly of grape lip-balm, and has a very sweet Fanta Grape flavour.
No joke… it’s called a ‘grapple‘, and they are on sale in South Africa.
After assurances from my wife that I was unlikely to grow breasts if I ate one of these unholy unions, I ate the fragrant fruit… and actually really enjoyed it!
Apparently they are not actually a hybrid fruit – the apples are marinaded in a grape concentrate to impart the flavour and scent.
There’s something very wrong about messing with an icon of natural and healthy simplicity like the apple, but there’s no denying the thrill of something very different and very tasty, and if they help moms feed more fruit to kids they can’t be all bad.
More like helps moms to feed their kids more sugar. Those suckers must be laden with the stuff.
I like the way the label tries to get you to “Say Grape-L” as opposed to straight-up ‘grapple’ – perhaps to avoid the connotation of “grappling to comprehend this lunacy.”
Okay, scratch that – apparently no extra sugar. But heck, that doesn’t make ‘em any less weird.
where in cape town can i buy grapples?