3QQ interview: Craig Calcaterra on Apple Pie
One of America's finest baseball writers shifts his focus.
It’s America Week! Can you smell the rising fascism? *Snifffffff* Every day this week we’re publishing a post about a different pillar of American culture or history.
Today, we have a special America-themed Three Quora Questions — our series of interviews in which a guest expert joins me to field strange and interesting questions posed on Quora.com (the internet’s oddest knowledge repository).
Craig Calcaterra writes extensively about both baseball and America in his daily newsletter, Cup of Coffee (which was one of the inspirations for Chortle). While that’s highly on brand for this week’s programming, I thought he might be a bit tired of those two topics. So I asked him three questions about the third wheel of that famous rhetorical tricycle… Apple Pie.
Do you like apple pie?
CRAIG: I absolutely love apple pie.
What things are at least as American as mom, baseball, and apple pie?
CRAIG: Road trips. Football (it's probably more American than baseball at this point). Being aggressively dismissive of stuff that happens in most of the rest of the world.
What did Carl Sagan mean when he said "If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe"?
CRAIG: Most people believe he meant something about how the component parts of absolutely everything are universally elemental, so one cannot have, say, apples or sugar or what have you without the basic molecules and atoms which form them which, in turn, are products of The Big Bang.
I prefer to think, however, that Sagan was alluding to how daunting it is to make a pie from scratch. Like, who even knows where lard is at the grocery store? And when was the last time you peeled and cored three or four pounds worth of apples? One may as well try to reconstruct the Big Bang singularity than bake a pie that, odds are, won't be as good as the one you can get from the Korger bakery. Or at least not as much better so as to justify the wasted afternoon.
That Sagan, he was a pragmatist at heart.