Are Apples the Thingiest Things?

Out of curiosity, I searched on 'apple' through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). Apple is used in 42 entries, almost invariably as an exemplar or instanciation of objective reality. The first entry that came up was, interestingly, the one on pain. There, apple is used as an example of a thing we can all sense - we all see, hear, smell, taste the same apple - as compared with pain, which is private. We each have direct knowledge from experience only of our own pain, in our own bodies. Another entry was the one on neutral monism. Monism is the idea that everything consists of one kind of stuff. According to neutral monism (as opposed to idealism or materialism) this one stuff of reality is neither mental nor physical. Spinoza was a neutral monist, according to SEP. Apples are used to illustrate Bertrand Russel's strange notion that things are organized around holes, that happen to project their aspects into the minds of the observers:

"The characteristic feature of the of this construction procedure is that it gathers up into one object the spatially scattered appearances of the object they are said to constitute. A particular oddity to this way of proceeding is that the groups that are physical objects are “hollow”—the apple presents apple-appearances all around it but it does not present such appearances where it is, i.e., in the region occupied by the apple. This central region “may be as small as an electron or as large as a star.” (Russell 1927a, 217) It is this feature of the view that critics such as A.O. Lovejoy have in mind when they call Russell's view “centrifugal realism” (Lovejoy 1930, 203) according to which “all material things…are built around holes” (Lovejoy 1930, 198) Russell happily acknowledged this consequence of his view and expressed in such slogans as: “‘Matter’ is a convenient formula for describing what happens where it isn't. (Russell 1927b, 126)." (SEP)

Apples are interesting, because they themselves are organised around a core. A core is a thing like a heart, we use it for expressions such as 'core values' to mean something central and incontrovertible. As already mentioned, apples were used in Wikipedia to differentiate Aristotle's philosophy from Plato's. Plato believed in a world of universal forms, where the perfect apple might reside, whereas for Aristotle the essence of appleness was in the core of each apple. Maybe having a core is the reason apple was used in that example. Imagine it being a potato!

In fact, I suggest that the heart symbol used in European iconography bears a much stronger resemblance to the seed-case of an apple sliced along the core than it does to any of the anatomical parts it is said to depict (an ox's heart, a woman's vulva). Go ahead, open an apple and tell me if I'm wrong.

SEP has zero entries for avocado, and while oranges are mentioned they are rarely used in the same way as apples. There are many more pages using 'egg' than 'apple', but eggs are cited as much for their potential (to become a chicken, or an embryo) as they are for their thingness as eggs. Leading me to wonder, are apples the thingiest of all things?