The Parable of the Apple Pie

There was once a bakery in a small community.  Not long after the bakery opened for business it quickly gained a reputation for baking some of the most fabulous apple pies in town.  As the bakery’s reputation grew people began to come to this town to live just so they could have a piece of the apple pie.

Never did the quality of ingredients change in the apple pie and the same tender loving care that went into the first apple pie was repeated in every apple pie that was sold.  People longed for the crisp sweet, tart flavor of the local apples, just the right amount of spices, and flaky pie crust.  Though many people preferred their apple pies warm and fresh with a scoop of ice cream, it was the pie they came for.

As the reputation of this bakery grew, people from a neighboring town decided they were going to raid the bakery and take total control of it so they could have it for themselves.  The mayor of the neighboring town was especially interested in the revenue the bakery could generate for his own town.  But the people of the little town where the bakery was located united together and defended their bakery.  As a result, their little town grew closer together and it continued to prosper.

In fact, because the people had united together around their apple pie bakery, they decided to work together to make the bakery’s pies available in other communities.  Of course, there were communities that did not like nor want apple pies, and that was fine.  But many communities loved the apple pies coming from the little bakery and were more than willing to buy the apple pies.

So valuable was the apple pie from this bakery that soon and entire economy grew from it.  There were farmers who planted their orchards into apples and who hired quality control employees.  The orchard machinery was being built in the town and bankers set up business to help control the flow of money and generate interest for investors.  The bakery had grown, but maintained the high standards it had started with. Traders in sugar and spices sat up business to keep the bakery in full supply of quality ingredients.  A trucking business grew in order to transport apples from the orchards to the bakery and to supply apple pies around the country.  Soon, the little stores that sold the apple pies grew into large grocery stores.  Shop keepers became chain store operators.  The townspeople knowing that the apple pie produced by the bakery was so important to their economy that they sent their children off to the best schools to become agronomists, biochemists, farmers, engineers, welders, plumbers, electricians, lawyers, teachers, doctors, nurses, firefighters, and police officers – all so they could keep the valued apple pies in their community.

Several miles away there was another community.  The people in that community saw the prosperity of the little town that was home to the famous apple pie bakery.  They knew that attempts had been made to take over the bakery by force, but realized that the townspeople worked together to prevent that from happening.  So, they devised a plan.  They decided that they would gradually move into the famous town and begin buying apple pies from that bakery.  One of them would get a job at the bakery and suggest that the owner could improve sales by altering the recipe to meet the desires of his friends who had also moved into the community.  Then after they had established themselves, they would demand that certain ingredients be omitted from the pies because it didn’t suit their needs.  They would then demand that other ingredients be substituted and that the way the pies were baked had to be modified to make them happy.

The owner of the bakery wanting to please everyone decided to make the few changes in the apple pies and did so gradually over a period of time.  At first, the townspeople were O.K. with the changes to accommodate the newcomers to the town, but after a while, the apple pies that were coming from the bakery tasted nothing like the original apple pies.  Soon, none of the original townspeople would go to the bakery for their apple pies.  Neighboring communities lost interest in the apple pies coming from the bakery.  The owner of the bakery seeing that he had lost all his business from the townspeople decided to sell his bakery.  He barely made a profit from the sale of his bakery to the newcomers and left town.

The bakery, now under ownership of the newcomers soon closed.  The apple pie that it was once famous for was no longer the apple pie it once was.  When the bakery closed, the community fell into disarray.  No longer were delicious, mouth-watering apple pies available to the world.  Farmers no longer had a buyer for their apples.  The trucking industry shut down.  With no customer to buy spices and sugar and other pie ingredients, the traders in those businesses closed their doors and left town.  When all these business owners left town to seek other opportunities, the lawyers, doctors, and bankers also left.  Soon, there was no revenue stream to fund village and the firefighters and police officers could no longer be paid, so they also left town.  Schools closed because few children were left to attend school and there were no teachers left to teach the remaining children.  Buildings burned to the ground since there were no firefighters and crime escalated when it was discovered that what few police were left could not handle all the calls for service.  Soon people began taking the law into their own hands.  The town became a brutal place to live.  People died from illnesses that could have been cured had there been doctors and nurses to care for them. 

While a few of the original townspeople had the means to live in the once prosperous little community, they discovered that they no longer had a say in the way their town operated.  They found themselves taxed at such a high rate to keep what little city services were available going that they could also no longer afford to live in what had once been their lovely little community.  And soon, they too left.

The bakery with its doors and windows long since boarded over, sat empty with the exception of apple peels here and there on the floor.  The distant town had moved in, but there were no more apple pies and without the apple pies there was no prosperity.

Meanwhile, those who left the town and people in neighboring communities longed for the day when they ate delicious, mouth-watering, warm apple pie.  But there was none.