Amit Dhingra is on a mission to make America fall in love with the pear.
In a lab at Washington State University, the 45-year-old horticulture researcher has dedicated much of the last decade to the shapely fruit. Building off relationships with pear growers who say their businesses are held back by a lack of scientific understanding of their product, Dhingra has mapped the pear genome, bred new trees, and even found a way to ripen the notoriously stiff fruit.
Throughout this work, Dhingra—who is affectionately known to some fruit growers in the Pacific Northwest as “Yogi Pear”—has been adamant in making the case that the pear is distinct from, and maybe more delicious than, its sexier, more successful sister: the apple. Pears can’t compete with the longstanding agricultural pinup in convenience and variety, he says—but only because they’ve been pushed to the sidelines in research and marketing. So he has taken it upon himself to level the playing field. With some better approaches, he believes, pears could step out from behind apples and come into their own.
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