8 ms·

They didn't really answer the most important question: how do they taste? Seems to follow that apple varieties ended up lost to the dustbin of history because

• rangibaby 6y ago
  Pick two: Tasty, looks perfect, stores well
• grawprog 6y ago
  I've tried lots of wild apples, apples from trees with consumable apples grafted on to them etc. Some of them make crab apples taste sweet. Most apples are probably about as sour as lemons and fairly tiny, from grape to small plumb size. They make your belly hurt and generally aren't that pleasant to eat. They're great for making pie or jam or such things. Homemade Apple crumble(crisp, I dunno whatever same shit...both good) is probably one of the best things next to homemade strawberry rhubarb pie, but either way, they're a far cry even from Granny Smith apples which, I enjoy, but as far as I know, most people use for baking.
  • Ericson2314 6y ago
    I think the best majority of those heirloom apples were for cider.
  • maxerickson 6y ago
    Granny Smith apples are popular for eating out of hand. In North America, unkept apples are feral. There's a fair chance they are descendants of trees planted at a homestead. The wild ancestor is from central Asia: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/5/apples-of-eden-saving-the-wild-ancestor-of-modern-apples/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/5/apples-of-ede...
    • stormdennis 6y ago
      I always found granny Smith to be a bit too firm. I prefer a sweeter apple with a softer crunch say like Pink Lady.
      • randlet 6y ago
        Interesting. If I could combine the flavor of a good Pink Lady with the crispness of a good Granny Smith I'd die a happy man.
        • nmcfarl 6y ago
          And if I could combine the flavor of a Granny Smith with the texture of a Pink Lady, I could. :)
    • Nux 6y ago
      Researcher's name is Newton, how fitting :)
    • Larrikin 6y ago
      I'm not the biggest fan but they aren't terrible. My rule of thumb is that if an apple variety has the word delicious in the name, there's s guarantee it will be mealy and disgusting
      • slfnflctd 6y ago
        Golden Delicious were my favorite variety as a kid/teen in the early 90s, and they never seemed to have the problems you describe back then. Very crisp, with just the right amount of sweet and juicy. I started noticing them going downhill probably in the late 90s or 00s-- I think something went sideways with their cultivation &/or supply chain. Similar thing happened with Red Delicious, I can occasionally still find a good one but they're usually inedible.
        • jacobush 6y ago
          Wow, that matches my experience - but I thought I had just developed a more refined taste. Golden and Red are almost and completely inedible to me, respectively.
• ip26 6y ago
  Additional varieties mean additional flavors. I don't know about you, but I buy six or eight different varieties at the store. Crunch, or sweet, or sour, or just pomme du jour... We get so focused on 'the BEST', that's how we wind up with a monocrop of banana clones, or the inedible (but pretty) Washington Delicious, etc.
  • ravenstine 6y ago
    Ha! I thought I was the only one who hated those apples. Worst part is that it's got "delicious" in the name. World's falsest advertising!
    • Ericson2314 6y ago
      I remember when very young repeated begging my mom to buy red delicious and each time being disappointed such a beautiful looking apple tasted so bad.
      • repiret 6y ago
        Recently an apple truck turned over, and so the wrecking company ended up selling damaged 50lb boxes of apples for $10. I bought a couple and was disappointed to learn they were red delicious. But they turned out to actually be really good. First time I remember ever liking a red delicious.
    • ceejayoz 6y ago
      You're definitely not the only one. The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious: How the worst apple took over the United States, and continues to spread https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/the-evil-reign-of-the-red-delicious/379892/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/the-evil-... The Long, Monstrous Reign of the Red Delicious Apple Is Ending: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/business/red-delicious-apple.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/29/business/red-delicious-ap...
    • ip26 6y ago
      They used to taste better. Key excerpts from the Atlantic article: as genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh. U.S. apple growers [...] made the apples redder and redder, and prettier and prettier, and they just about bred themselves out of existence
• greglindahl 6y ago
  The "right fruit" usually depends on personal tastes plus the application: eating whole fruit, juice/fermented juice, preserves, baking, accent flavor in a salad. There are a lot of reasons that things can end up in the dustbin of history other than taste in one circumstance.
  • Spooky23 6y ago
    Great point. When I was growing up, my parents property was subdivided from a large old farm and orchard that had been farmed from the Dutch colonial era. We had apple trees that everyone considered junk/crabapples. (Although my mom made pie with them) Later, we learned they are a well regarded heirloom for cider and other alcohol making purposes! Cider was a big thing in the Early 1900s and has made a resurgence.
    • iguy 6y ago
      Cider was huge, the main reason to plant an orchard. IIRC selling the idea of apples as a healthy thing to eat (and perhaps even apple pie as patriotic) was a clever marketing "pivot" under prohibition -- orchards were otherwise headed the way of the brewers & distilleries.
• vikramkr 6y ago
  Most important question is a matter of two things. History and genetics. You preserve history for it's own sake. And you preserve biodiversity to take advantage of all sorts of traits for breeding. One might be particularly cold hardy, another resistant to blight, and so on. Or not. You preserve them for their own sake. And also because people just love this stuff.
• mannykannot 6y ago
  Mass production biases towards produce that is cheap, easy to grow in a wide range of environments, travels well and and is generally reliable. Mass marketing tends towards the bland, as can be seen today in the plague of ruby grapefruit.
  • 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago
    Some things you buy in the store don’t even taste remotely like what you grow. Tomatoes are night and day difference. They pick them green for travel robustness, and “ripen” then with ethylene, so you’re eating a red but unripe tomatoes. Strawberries are another one. Do yourself a favor and get some ripe strawberries locally sometime. They’re nothing like that Drischoll’s stuff in the stores!
    • cultofmetatron 6y ago
      Currently in Greece and the strawberries here are not only pretty but extremely flavorful. I don't think I'll ever be able to enjoy the American supermarket shietberry after trying the good stuff over here.
• j4nt4b 6y ago
  Many varieties of cultivated plants can die out for reasons other than their usefulness. I spent some time living on a farm in Maine and two stories I heard there come to mind, one about wheat, and the other about tomatoes. Wheat was once cultivated as far north as Maine, where cold-hardy varieties were developed in order to lengthen the growing season and allow local farmers to supply the state's bakeries in what would otherwise be an inhospitable climate to more productive, but less hardy varieties of wheat grown in warmer areas further south. However, once the railroads reached Maine in the 19th century and were able to bring cheaper grain to market, farmers stopped growing wheat and the varieties grown then are now completely lost. Many northern homesteaders would love to have that seed today but it's gone. Another example I heard from a woman who specializes in selling heirloom tomato seeds and starts. By the way, in contrast to apples, which do not produce identical offspring from seeds, tomatoes do. If you plant apples, expect the unexpected. But if you plant tomatoes, you'll get pretty much the same thing you started with. The tomato grower showed me a delicious variety that was discovered when a schoolboy arrived at school with a tomato and told his teacher "My grandfather says this tomato is special. But he's dying and he doesn't want it to be lost." It turns out that his family had brought over a variety of tomato from Italy as immigrants and had cultivated it for generations. Its quality was the reason it was almost lost forever - so good they kept it their own special secret until time almost ran out.
  • 3fe9a03ccd14ca5 6y ago
    > But if you plant tomatoes, you'll get pretty much the same thing you started with. Unfortunately this is not true. Many tomatoes with the best disease resistance are hybrids, and seeds will not produce the same plant with the same disease resistance. Heirlooms varieties will “generally” produce the same plant but you have to be careful about inbreeding. > It turns out that his family had brought over a variety of tomato from Italy as immigrants and had cultivated it for generations. The funny part about this is tomatoes are a new world veggie! So the plant went from America to Italy, and then a new variety was brought back to the homeland. I’d love to try this variety!
    • asdkjh345fd 6y ago
• dehrmann 6y ago
  Also shelf life, and that might mean shelf life in farm's cellar over the winter, not large-scale cold storage.
• asdkjh345fd 6y ago
  >Seems to follow that apple varieties ended up lost to the dustbin of history because they didn't taste very good? Nope. Cider varieties fell out of favor because cider fell out of favor, and most don't taste very good for eating. But heritage eating apples fell out of favor because they do not ship well, or don't grow well in synthetically fertilized dirt, or due to marketing. Most heritage varieties of eating apples taste WAY better than bland crap like honeycrisp. Red delicious were the most produced apple for many years even though basically nobody likes them. Because they look very appealing, and they are very durable so they can be handled roughly and shipped all over. Try a Cox's Orange Pippin and you'll never be able to eat grocery store apples again.
  • Loughla 6y ago
    We just replaced our apple trees in our little orchard. I needed a pollinator for the Wagener apples we replaced. I like Wagener's because they're similar to a Johnathan, but stand our clay soils quite a bit better. The only options the company (Starks Bros. in Louisiana, Mo. literally the only thing in that town) had for pollinators for that tree were $20 red delicious (sold out), $20 yellow delicious (sold out), and the $89 Cox's Orange Pippin. So we ordered one. I have legitimately never heard of that tree until I ordered one to plant this week. I've said to everyone I know that it had better be the best apple I've ever eaten for that price! What a weird coincidence.
    • Wildgoose 6y ago
      It's a great apple - they're popular in England. My own favourite is probably Worcester Pearmain. England is blessed with a huge variety of apple types, it's just a shame that the supermarkets concentrate on a fairly small selection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_Pearmain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worcester_Pearmain
• Turing_Machine 6y ago
  > Seems to follow that apple varieties ended up lost to the dustbin of history because they didn't taste very good? There was a long, long period in which resistance to rough handling during shipping and long storage was far more important than taste. To some degree, that's still true, although we're in much better shape with respect to tasty fruit and vegetables than people were even as recently as the 1980s. For decades, just about the only type of tomato you could get in a standard grocery store was the aptly-named "Red Rock" variety. Farmers markets and specialty stores sometimes offered a better selection in rural and large urban areas, but for most of the country it was either Red Rock or grow them yourself.