The numbers are impressive. Somewhere near 8,000 varieties of apples now grow all over the globe. Apples grew wild as long back as the genus Homo did, millions of years ago. They are among the most diverse of living things. Science is closing in on the number of genes in the apple genome (around 50,000, versus a mere 25,000 or so for the human). And yet, at least in the United States, we pretty much narrow our apple buying and eating to a couple dozen varieties, with six or seven (such as the Gala and the ascendant Honeycrisp) of most interest. Whereas other countries distinguish between cooking apples and eating apples, we tend to conflate the two purposes into the same apple.