Listen to this post We’ve all heard the phrase, “one bad apple ruins the whole bunch.” It’s an old school idiom. (Like, really old school … Shakespearean, maybe even earlier.) Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanack” (circa 1736) put it this way: “The rotten apple spoils his companion.” In these days when we buy a half dozen carefully selected apples out of a frequently refreshed produce bin, that idiom loses some meaning. Those of us who have bought our food in bulk to feed hungry households of teenagers have some modern insight. Among the fruits one can buy, apples have one of the longest storage times. Even the wrinkliest old apple can usually be turned into an apple pie or a cobbler or a batch of tasty applesauce. That is unless there’s a real bad apple in the bunch. Who hasn’t sorted through a bag of apples only to find that one near the bottom has gone bad and turned all the surrounding apples into mushy blobs of goo?