Uh, why does my apple have a seam?

So the other day I was at Metro Market and I saw a Trader Joe's-style clamshell dealie containing four small very round apples.  The label on the package said: "Grapple" and told me to "Say Grape-L." 

Normally, I resent it when my produce orders me around, but okay, I thought, color me intrigued.

I thought for a moment they might be Stamen Winesaps, one of the apples we had in our Apple Tasting last year.  When we ate that apple, we all had big question marks floating over our heads for a minute.  "What is that taste?"  My friend and the hostess Carolyn said it was something she remembered from childhood. 

That's when it hit me: Grape Bubblicious.  They tasted exactly like Grape Bubblicious.  I wrote down on our little tasting notes sheet that Will, Carolyn's husband, had us complete: "a cartoon of an apple."  Because it was, if a flavor produced by nature can be silly, this was it.

So anyway, for a moment I thought it was a little box of Stamen Winesaps, so I picked it up and then I saw it: an ingredients label.  Ingredients: "apples and natural and artificial flavor" (emphasis added).  The apple had grape flavor infused into it so it is, per the company's website, "healthy as ever but now has the new exciting grape flavor."

Okay, man, I am all for progress, but who the hell needs artificial flavor in their apples?

And if you are going to put an artificial flavor into a fruit...why make the flavor another fruit?  Like why not make it chocolate or Watermelon Bubblicious or something way different?  That's like, "OMG, taste this king salmon!  It tastes just like coho! Crazeee!!"

Actually, this all makes me kind of sad.  Because I am sure it was done with some kind of earnestness by someone who was super-excited to figure out how to do it.  But just because something can be done doesn't mean it should.

Anyway, so this is what I thought of today when I set about eating this apple, which had a seam like it had been constructed in a mold.

I know it's just a natural anomaly, but I couldn't help but look around me, thinking, Monsanto?  Soylent Green?