But yeah, in order for each piece to still have anything in common with apples or pies any more than soot or diamonds, you’d have to keep the molecules intact. Really, you’d need enough molecules to make a proportional sample of each type of molecule that adds to the flavor, and some of those are huge (a typical protein is a molecule with thousands of atoms…) and in small enough quantities that to adequately represent them, the total sample size would have to be millions of atoms. This brings us right past freight trains and into the aircraft carrier range.