In my waning days as an editor at the Hartford Courant in 1993, I was invited into the uber-geeky, somehow uber-cool Les Amies du Pomme (that's French, and I'm not, so I'm sure at least part of that is wrong). It was a cabal of nature-loving colleagues who would buy heirloom apples from rural Connecticut roadside stands and bring them to our private sampling table in the break room.