22 ms·

Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

275 points by kareemm 5y ago

koolba 5y ago
> “It turns out that a lot of the genes that coded for the flavor-producing compounds were on the same chromosomes as the genes for the yellow striped skin,” Traverso explains, “so as you favored the more consistently colored apples, you were essentially disfavoring the same genes that coded for great flavor. This is also why so many cultivars of tomato and cucumber taste like moist cardboard. Once you taste what they’re actually supposed to taste like, you’ll never be able to go back to a shrink-wrapped English cucumber grown in a hot house.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wwweston 5y ago
  What's a good cucumber alternative and how do I get a hold of it?
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    Look for regional producers or farmers markets. I’m lucky to live in upstate NY with ready access to farm stands about 30 minutes away. Usually smaller producers make different choices in terms of variety.
    - quantified 5y ago
      The US Northeast has so many apples that don’t travel well and have so much flavor: Spenser, Macoun, Empire... on the West Coast they’re all lacrosse balls that taste OK to decent but mainly travel well.
      - Spooky23 5y ago
        Everyone complains about the northeast re: weather, etc. But there’s a ton of stuff like this that many of us who live here take for granted!
        quantified 5y ago
        I miss that aspect of New England. Agriculture there is much more local. Apple picking in the fall was a delight.
  - dheera 5y ago
    Ideally get "Japanese cucumbers" from a Japanese grocery store, or get the "Persian cucumbers" from any grocery store that has decent typography in its logo (yes there is a HUGE correlation between logo typography and cucumber quality in my experience).
  - SEJeff 5y ago
    https://www.rareseeds.com/store/vegetables/cucumbers https://www.rareseeds.com/store/vegetables/cucumbers Bakers Creek only sells heirloom seeds (no cultivars). I get most of my garden seeds from them as they have the lineage of the seeds they sell available.
    - koolba 5y ago
      These seeds are amazing. The Beit Alpha cucumbers are fantastic and the Purple Bumble Bee cherry tomatoes are some of the greatest I’ve ever eaten.
    - jtc331 5y ago
      Heirloom varieties (more properly “open pollinated”) are themselves cultivars, which just means something that was selected/bred/domesticated. I think you’re trying to get at “hybrids” (which just means the breeding isn’t stable, i.e., the next generation isn’t first red to match the parents, but even hybrids can be quite tasty. The issue isn’t the breeding process per se; the issue is selectively breeding for the wrong things (or a single thing instead of a mix of things).
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  Nearly nobody under the age of 35 is aware that popcorn used to taste like corn. Not like modern ears of corn, which are bred mostly for sweetness; more like tortilla chips, whose corn is still (somehow) cultivated for corn flavor. Corny. [edit] … also I’m baffled by how, every time I “hold the tomatoes” on my burger or salad, someone will invariably say “don’t you like tomatoes?” and I have to go on this dumb rant about how the flavor has been bred out. Like, all these people have had marinara sauce and even ketchup, which are made from varieties of tomatoes that are still cultivated for flavor (and thus unsuitable for long-distance shipping). They know what tomatoes actually taste like!! yet still eat these slices of pink tomato that somehow have less flavor than American cucumbers and think “this is the same thing”
  - jareklupinski 5y ago
    i too stopped ordering tomatos for this reason some people mentioned looking for places that advertise using heirloom tomatos, but you still have to give them a good pinch of salt would love to join a startup that re-engineers flavor back into commercially-viable crops
    - titzer 5y ago
      Just move to Europe.
      - dnzkw 5y ago
        Sorry to tell you tomatoes are flavourless in Europe as well.
        watwut 5y ago
        Yep. You have to grow own tomatoes to have good ones. Which is something only few people are willing and have option to do.
        hoseja 5y ago
- sliken 5y ago
  This is also why many AKC pure bred dogs have serious health problems. Turns of you select only on a simple metric like hair color, ear shape, of slope of the back, that you end up selecting for things that go against the very heart of what the breed was. So you lose characteristics that led to the breed in the first place.
  - aix1 5y ago
    That, and inbreeding https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/although-purebred-dogs-can-be-best-in-show-are-they-worst-in-health/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/although-purebred... https://www.instituteofcaninebiology.org/blog/inbreeding-of-purebred-dogs-determined-from-dna https://www.instituteofcaninebiology.org/blog/inbreeding-of-...
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  With tomatoes, I thought it was more that most are not ripened on the vine, they are picked green so they ship better, then ripened artificially with ethelene gas. They turn red, but don't develop the same flavor or texture as a real ripe tomato. Same with strawberries.
- leotaku 5y ago
  Somehow I don't seem to have the same experience as most people in this thread. Sure, homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers taste quite a bit better than what I usually buy at the supermarket, but it certainly isn't perfect vs. inedible. Possible explanations I can think of: 1. My taste perception is just broken because I am relatively young and have been raised on low-quality produce. 2. My local supermarkets just happen to stock excellent vegetables (I live in Central Europe). 3. There are some extremely high-quality breeds of tomatoes/cucumbers that I have never eaten before. 4. Other people are simply more enthusiastic about vegetable quality and therefore their claims seem exaggerated to me.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    I think there are two things involved. First is that some produce really is terrible -- "regular" cheap tomatoes can be utterly flavorless. But on the other hand, a lot of supermarkets stock tomatoes that range from fine to quite excellent, e.g. cherry tomatoes grown in greenhouses sold on the vine. And second is that people really do exaggerate how great homegrown tomatoes are. There are tomato snobs in the same way there are coffee snobs, whiskey snobs, chocolate snobs, whatever. They insist something is 100x better, when really it's just 1.5x better, because for some reason that's important to them, part of their identity. Yes, a farmer's-market heirloom tomato is utterly delicious. But store-bought cherry tomatoes on the vine are also super super tasty. Even the ones not on the vine can be really really good. (You can also find really bad ones though, it depends on the store.) I'd go so far as to say they're just different, neither obviously better than the other.
  - ido 5y ago
    Where in Central Europe are you? And are you buying the cheapest tomatoes available? The answer to these can vary results a lot.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    It’s pretty much this skit https://youtu.be/4ZK8Z8hulFg https://youtu.be/4ZK8Z8hulFg
  - TroisM 5y ago
    Stores sell heirloom tomatoes too... sometime at twice the price though...
- spfzero 5y ago
  It’s not just flavor that has been bred out. Also nutrition, and not just from tomatoes. Consumers can not visually see flavor or nutrition. They can see color, size, and uniformity of surface texture and shape. So the vegetables are bred for what can be seen and immediately considered in a buying decision.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    Some of it is just size, as in the larger sized produce might have a similar amount of nutrition per unit (per tomato or per berry) but not per pound, so the nutrition is diluted with fiber and water but still there. Though there are also a whole lot of edible plants out there that don’t hold up at all to distribution, if you aren’t picking it by hand and eating it the same day it will be ruined.
- hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
  Search for the good stuff https://tomatoeden.com/ https://tomatoeden.com/ There are many heirloom and flavour providers, put your money where your mouth is!
jbluepolarbear 5y ago
There are Apple orchards that were abandoned in Washington State that my dad use to to take us to. These orchards had only red delicious and they were the best apples I’ve had. There are a lot of abandoned orchards around Washington and old species keep getting found.
- jay_kyburz 5y ago
  I hated apples all thought my childhood, but once I had my own kids I started buying more interesting variety's (even just from the supermarket) and I'm really hooked. Love em. It might also help that I have tried to cut down on sugar and apples are now one of the sweetest things I eat. I also discovered that cutting apples into bite size chunks for kids makes them taste better!
  - my_usernam3 5y ago
    If you haven't already, get one of those apple (and pear) slicers. I don't usually advocate for single purpose kitchen appliances, but these are life changing.
- krupan 5y ago
  Where in WA?
  - jbluepolarbear 5y ago
    The ones I went to were near Okanogan Valley; though some could have been in Canada as well.
tipoftheiceberg 5y ago
Please support your local orchards if possible! The apples you find in stores don’t even compare to some of the unique cultivars you can find at many orchards
- mark-r 5y ago
  I live very close to where the Honeycrisp was developed, and sadly I don't frequent them or the other local orchards as much as I should.
- nkozyra 5y ago
  A big part of this is that a lot of varieties don't travel well. But commercial apples like ambrosia and honeycrisp do and are pretty tasty. Ubiquity of red delicious is sort of baffling. There's also a huge chunk of the country where apples don't grow well due to lack of sufficient freeze.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  Visiting orchards in Autumn was a fun annual tradition when I lived in the Northern US. The whole fam would enjoy those days together picking apples. No orchards nearby this part of Texas, though.
mark-r 5y ago
The Red Delicious stands out to me as the textbook example of the power of naming and marketing. The origin story is unbeatable. The power of a name on our perceptions is undeniable. Realizing all of this has been one of the most empowering discoveries of my adult life.
- axaxs 5y ago
  True, but it also sucks because so many people say 'i dont like apples', including me until my mid 20s. Red Delicious are awful in every metric. Once a friend opened my eyes to pink ladies and honeycrisps, I was blown away and felt..cheated somehow.
  - smhost 5y ago
    It's crazy. I always subconsciously assumed that Red Delicious apples were how apples have always been (because they taste/look so much less appetizing than the other ones, therefore they must be the most "natural"), and that those other apples were genetically modified. And, being an immigrant, I thought it might even be a cultural difference, and that Americans just prefer the taste of Red Delicious. This is blowing my mind.
    - axaxs 5y ago
      IIRC, most apples aren't genetically modified as we use the term today, just 'hybridized'/crossbred or whatever the word is. I think they're also all sterile.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        I've been throwing the cores out into the wild parts of the lawn for 20 years. None have germinated.
        genewitch 5y ago
        birds love apple seeds and pepper seeds, though.
dmitryminkovsky 5y ago
This is a great account if you’re interested in fruit cultivars: https://mobile.twitter.com/pomological https://mobile.twitter.com/pomological
nostrademons 5y ago
Red Delicious was my favorite apple as a kid. Some of this might be questionable taste - my sister's favorite was a Mcintosh - but I wonder if they were better 40 years ago. Had one recently and it was underwhelming. My wife turned me on to Pink Ladies and Fujis and I'll never go back to Delicious.
- whatever_dude 5y ago
  The article is explicitly stating and explaining why they were indeed better 40 years ago.
ggm 5y ago
Apples, like Tomato are textbook examples of what mechanised volume production and warehousing does to "tasty". You can either have cheap food, or you can have good food, but good cheap food (where good means nutritious, delicious) is a lot harder and Cheap generally beats out good anyway, for most people. Remember in context, we probably waste over 30% of the produce along the supply chain, seeking absolutely "perfect" blemish free apples in a tray, wrapped in plastic, cheaper than before. Down here in Oz people have moved on from "organic is better for you" (debatable) to "I like it better" which being couched in the preference space, is less contestable. I do like things which taste bettter, and I am prepared to pay the premium to get them. I would be interested if the same process which took red delicious to stable, thick skinned, resilient also reduced nutritive value, we read increasingly that abundant food production often includes reducing actual food value (vitamins, minerals, antioxidents, flavones), in favour of mass production but I don't know how true it is.
- wyldfire 5y ago
  > Remember in context, we probably waste over 30% of the produce along the supply chain, seeking absolutely "perfect" blemish free apples in a tray, wrapped in plastic, cheaper than before. over the last fifty years (or more?) grocery stores have evolved to have onsite bakeries/etc that take food that looks unappealing or would otherwise spoil soon and make them into prepared foods. Ready to eat meals, prepped ingredients, etc. Though it's probably only down to 30% after efforts like these, though.
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    Really? I had always assumed that unsold food gets thrown away (or maybe at a best case donated), and supply chains for bakeries etc are 100% separate by design.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      The local supermarket sells whole roasted chickens that you can buy hot and ready to eat. The ones that don't sell are deboned and shredded and used for chicken salad, barbeque "pulled" chicken, etc.
koyote 5y ago
I think it's quite interesting that it's taken so long for a lackluster tasting food to decline in popularity. When I moved to the US from Western Europe, the relative difference in food quality was quite apparent and I distinctly remember noticing this first with the apples: At first I thought I might have chosen a bad batch, but after a couple of more buys I realised that these apples looked 'perfect' but always tasted foamy. I assumed what the article confirms: the apples were chosen for their looks and not their taste. What I think is weird about that mentality is that surely after the initial buy "oh these look declicious!", the consumer will try them and think "oh these don't taste good. I won't buy them again". Maybe it's just habit and it's taken a while for people to change that habit, especially if you never try anything different to compare it with. I know a lot of Americans that do not like apples because all they've ever had were the foamy ones.
- smegger001 5y ago
  Its not just the perfect look that Red Delicious was bred for but shelf life. Those things take forever to rot compared to other apples and hide bruising, but they end up with dry mealy texture and very thick waxy skin. They were optimized for apple sellers not apple eaters.
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    > They were optimized for apple sellers not apple eaters. The American food industry is optimised for sellers, not eaters [1]. It is that way because the scalar nature of capital in America favours national businesses, not local businesses (or nutritional well being). Consumers fit in with this model out of necessity because they are workers who cannot allocate enough time to food shopping, preparation, and cooking. Instead, they minimise the time spent on food procurement by going to the supermarket, which is the ultimate expression of scalar capitalism. [1] Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us ISBN1400069807 (ISBN13: 9781400069804), Michael Moss, Random House, 2013
    - smegger001 5y ago
      oh absolutely and it is all most economically optimal and rational thing to do for everyone involved. It is just soulless and dismal. each step of the way is rational in isolation, its when it all together that it becomes an awful abomination .
aetherson 5y ago
Envy apples are good.
- brohoolio 5y ago
  I do enjoy Envy apples but only if they are fresh. They fade faster than any other Apple I’ve encountered. By that I mean they lose their crispness and become undesirable. My personal favs are honey crisp and cosmic crisp, but I’d prefer an Envy only if it’s fresh.
- smegger001 5y ago
  I prefer pink lady, or opal apple myself. I used to eat a lot of golden delicious but the local stores haven't carried them regularly for several years around here.
every 5y ago
Uh, winesap please...
ithinkso 5y ago
Reinette were always my favorite apples, sort of popular in Poland but nor very 'presentable' [1]. Still, the best imho [1] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reneta#/media/Plik:Egremont_Russet_Apple.jpg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reneta#/media/Plik:Egremont_Ru...
- mcv 5y ago
  Sounds (and looks) like the Goudreinet, the classic apple for Dutch apple pie.
WalterBright 5y ago
I thought it was just me that hated the Red Delicious. The Fujis and Granny Smiths seem to be going downhill fast. The Galas are ok. I planted my own apple tree 20 years ago. Some years I get some fruit that the deer missed, and those are awesome.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I like Granny Smith sliced with peanut butter. They are also pretty good for cooking.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jhgb 5y ago
Does this apply only to the US-grown apples, or is this a global problem? > When you picture an apple, you probably picture a Red Delicious Actually, I picture a Granny Smith. ;)
- rsynnott 5y ago
  Applies in Ireland; we don’t have the red delicious, but we do have the “golden delicious” (if consumer protection law had any teeth, these would be called “yellowish horrible” instead) and Gala and other Bad Apples. I think it may apply less in continental Europe.
  - jhgb 5y ago
    By virtue of preferring green apples, I've only had a local Red Delicious a few times in the past, but I don't recall having had any problem with the taste - except for, well, being too sweet for me. I guess I'll have to buy some the next time I see them to see what the fuss is about (and if there is any fuss to be had in the first place).
axguscbklp 5y ago
I agree that supermarket fruits and vegetables often seem to lack in flavor but to my taste, Red Delicious is not worse than any other supermarket apple. All supermarket apples, even the sour ones, pretty much just taste like slightly different variants of sugar water to me - the sourness of the sour apples just rides on top of the sugar water taste without really displacing it. I do not know why Red Delicious specifically has been singled out as the target of multiple critical articles given that one could just as accurately write such articles about all sorts of produce. Do most people really think that other supermarket apples taste any better than Red Delicious?
- smegger001 5y ago
  because it doesn't even have the sugar water taste going for it. it been so over optimzed for appearance shape and shelf life that the texture has become unpleasant, the flavor is non existent, and for years it was "The Apple" you have generations that had one of those awful thing sent in their school lunch every day (and usually threw it away without a single bite), that have grown up had enough of this garbage apple and it is now emblematic of bad flavorless fruit and vegetable in stores.
  - axguscbklp 5y ago
    I can taste the sugar water in Red Delicious and I actually enjoy the texture, but I understand the rest.
    - sumtechguy 5y ago
      I specifically use them only for cooking. The extra sugar in the other apples can caramelize too quickly for many dishes.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  Here in Australia the supermarket apples can be excellent. Tasty, crisp, juicy, sweet/tart, consistently reliable, and beautiful to look at. Do you have Jazz apples? They are the best.
fouc 5y ago
Damn breeders.. ruining apples and dogs over time. Always going for some aesthetic ideal over performance.
- smegger001 5y ago
  oh they bred for performance just with different metric than the consumer would prefer. they can sit on a shelf without rotting far longer than say a gala jazz or opal apple, they hide bruising, all great traits if you are a supermarket chain storing hundreds of thousands in a warehouse for months at a time waiting to send them out to stores over the course of a year between harvests.
irrational 5y ago
Good article, but the author’s conclusion is flawed. Pink Lady is the best eating apple ;-) (Before anyone brings up Honeycrisp - I do think it is the best saucing apple.)
mcv 5y ago
As a kid, I was a fan of Golden Delicious, while others criticised it for being too mealy. That wasn't my experience, at least at first. Eventually I encountered increasingly mealy Golden "Delicious", and started favouring other apples. Even the cheapest apples here, like Elstar and Jonagold, are pretty good in comparison. I wonder if it's the fate of any breed to eventually be bred for looks instead of taste. If you see two apples (or any other fruit or vegetable) of the same name, aren't you more likely to pick the tastier looking one? You can't taste them in the shop, but you can compare by looks. So eventually, that's what they end up being bred for. I'd expect the only way to protect an apple from that fate, would be to trademark the name, and the rightsholder only licenses the name to apples from cultivars that breed for taste and don't sacrifice taste for looks. This might be a case where IP rights might be used for good.
- exDM69 5y ago
  > I wonder if it's the fate of any breed to eventually be bred for looks instead of taste. No, fruit trees are predominantly propagated by cloning, by grafting branches into a root stock. This method has been used already in prehistoric times. New varieties are created by producing seeds, but then they are no longer called the same "breed". There is a big element of luck involved due to cross pollination and only specialized growers practice it. The issue you mention is common in plants propagated through seeds, such as tomatoes and carrots. Modern tomato varieties are red, big, robust in transport... and tasteless.
  - wincy 5y ago
    There’s an interesting planet money podcast about the thousands of trees grown to find the honey crisp apple. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/episode-627-the-miracle-apple https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/epis...
  - the__alchemist 5y ago
    I may be misinterpreting, but I think the comment you replied to implies natural(artificial?)-selection at the supermarket-selection level; not actual breeding of the trees.
MisterBastahrd 5y ago
I had a real sweet tooth as a kid and learned early on that a bruised Red Delicious was a sweeter apple, so I would take some apples from my parents' kitchen and bruise them all over and let them rest for a day. The result was not only sweeter, but more flavorful too.
dgan 5y ago
I absolutely love apples, and those Red Delicious are quite delicious No idea what the article is complaining about
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  Wonder if it is a regional thing? Maybe there are several varieties of red delicious? But they all get the same name? In the area I live in now they are fairly bland and do not taste very good. But when I was a kid we would goto nebraska city and get a couple of bushels of them and those were very good otherwise we would not have bought that many.
  - ragingrobot 5y ago
    Most likely. If I go to the local produce market here in central NJ, when it's apple season they sell the local apples (in fact this particular market has it's own apple orchard). If you hold a Red Delicious from Washington State and one from Jew Jersey, they are obviously different in shape. The Washington apple tends to be the boxy, tapered apple we're familiar with. The NJ Red Delicious is a globe, looking more like a Honeycrisp or Winesap in shape with the coloring of a Red Delicious. The NJ has a sweeter (although not significanty so) taste unlike the bland Washington (and others).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jefftk 5y ago
Since apples are propagated by grafting (cloning), has anyone kept original ("heirloom"?) Red Delicious stock from before it was optimized for looks? I'd be very curious to try one!
- acdha 5y ago
  If you go around local orchards, you'll see them from time to time — I've seen them in CT, MD, NY, PA, and VA. If they don't look like supermarket apples, they're worth eating.
- derbOac 5y ago
  I lived in Iowa for a time not too far from where they were originally from, and the red delicious apples there in local orchards on old trees are probably pretty close to what they were originally like. They're smaller than the prototypical ones you find in the grocery, with a thinner skin, more mottled or striped and round in appearance, and have flavor sort of like mcintosh. If you know what they are, you'll probably be able to identify the red delicious flavor, mostly in the skin I think. However, my guess is if you gave one to a bunch of people they probably wouldn't recognize them as red delicious apples. They might identify them as mcintosh or something like that.
- dotcommand 5y ago
  I recently watched a youtube video about why avocados cannot be grown by seed and learned about grafting. Interesting stuff. Didn't know apples also were grown through grafting.
  - 3minus1 5y ago
    There's an interesting discussion in Gun, Germs, and Steel where Jared Diamond claims that wild apples were inedible (IIRC due to cyanide in the seeds) and could only be domesticated after the invention of grafting technology.
  - tsjq 5y ago
    also give a read about those green apples. (Granny Smith?). IIRC, all of these are grafts from one single tree. cmiw pls .
legohead 5y ago
red delicious are great. for a while I was purposely buying different apples each week and checked my kid's reactions. turns out they like gala and red delicious the most.
LorenPechtel 5y ago
This is why a lot of people grow produce at home. Seeds/plants meant for home growing favor tasty over transportability and thus most garden produce is far superior to what the store sells.
whynotkeithberg 5y ago
I was a massive fan of red delicious as a kid... I remember I continued buying them up until about 5-6 years ago because I always remembered the incredible taste but it never seemed to match up with my memories. I read a similar article 5-6 years ago and that's when I finally stopped buying. Now I mostly buy Pink Lady or Honeycrisp. Although the new Cosmic Crisp apples are quite great too and they last forever in the fridge.
aVx1uyD5pYWW 5y ago
I find that red delicious actually tastes quite good if you manage to eat it before it becomes mealy. Sweet, juicy, crisp bite. The problem is just that they become mealy relatively quickly.
dotcommand 5y ago
That explains why red apples taste horrible but what happened to grapes? I remember when grapes were the dark bluish/blackish concord types and now, the supermarkets mostly carry green and purple grapes which taste awful in comparison.
- tsjq 5y ago
  similar story. good looking + lower costs + seedless = unintentionally optimised towards poor taste :(
swayvil 5y ago
I recommend the Pippin apple.
gowan 5y ago
imo the granny smith is the all time worse apple. always taste like a green apple (not trying to be ironic) and usually has a thick skin. just plain terrible might as well pick any apple variety before it is ripe. if you want a good green apple buy a newtown pippin.
- quesera 5y ago
  I like 'em crisp and tart (and cold), so Granny Smith from the refrigerator is my default. I recall Newtown Pippins being a bit sweeter than I like, but I understand they vary. Is there a time of year, or another way to select for tartness?
- Tagbert 5y ago
  I use the Granny Smith for cooking but not as an eating apple. They have a good texture and tartness for pies and apple sauce but they are not what i would want to eat raw.
mtnGoat 5y ago
I live in the "Apple Capital of the World", had to learn about apples my whole life. I'm not sure its a fair to make blanket statements about red delicious apples as many are not cloned/grafted, so the taste varies from producer to producer. The big name varieties of apples now are all copyright/trademark and grown via grafting, making output control much easier. Many of the older red del orchards are old and no longer profitable due to modern day orchard planting and management being much more advanced. As those orchards get replaced they get replanted or grafts from a currently more profitable variety are put into them. A reasonable amount of new varieties are growing on stumps/roots that once produced red delicious fruits. Rave and Ambrosia are the two variants Stemilt is pushing hard these days. the average now is around 12 years before they switch the varieties and put new grafts on a stump. seven years to get back to full production size, 5 years of product and then switch. the apple varieties being marketed today have been in the works for near a decade or more.
jader201 5y ago
I used to love apples. Until I realized that most of the ones I would buy ended up being mealy. It was like rolling dice as to whether one would be mealy. Maybe it’s because we started buying organic? We got some apples one time that weren’t organic, and they were great. If organic apples are too susceptible to being mealy, I guess I’d rather just eat other organic fruits vs. eating non-organic apples.
- Tagbert 5y ago
  A mealy texture usually means that apple is old and was not recently picked. Some varieties, like the red delicious of this article were bred to not get mealy as they age but at a cost. There is nothing specific about organic that would make the apples mealy but if they were varieties not bred for long life or if they were slow sellers due to price, you might get a high percentage of mealy apples.
barathr 5y ago
I'd encourage everyone to check out California Rare Fruit Growers generally, and specifically this list of apples from a tasting a couple years ago: http://mbcrfg.org/apple-tasting-2019-rankings/ http://mbcrfg.org/apple-tasting-2019-rankings/
ljm 5y ago
I haven't seen red delicious on sale in UK supermarkets for ages. I used to back in my childhood, when you had a variety of loose apples on sale. We bought red delicious and golden delicious because they were cheaper, and we got granny smith apples as a treat. I liked red more than golden for reasons I don't remember but I think red had a stronger crunch and a thicker skin. I really don't like over-sweet fruit and it feels like a lot of fruits have been engineered for extra sweetness. So these days I try and stick to boring/milder stuff like Braeburn or Gala. Even for other fruits, like strawberries, it's hard to find a punnet that isn't the 'supersweet' variety.
mastazi 5y ago
I was lucky that I could grow up in a family where we produced most of the food we ate[1]. The main thing I learned, is that the interests of food consumers and food producers are, and always will be, misaligned, unless you are the one producing the food you eat. When I was a kid, I used to despise supermarket food (I later learned to eat it out of necessity, once I moved out of my parent's place). Now I'm saving up so I can buy a homestead when I retire, and my dream is to produce food for me and my loved ones. [1] I grew up on a small farm and homestead in Italy, my grandparents and parents had a few money crops (olive oil, wine, eggs) and everything else on the farm was for our own consumption (veggie garden, orchard, meat chickens, pigs, rabbits etc.).
TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago
I assume this kind of disaster is why Pink Lady is a trademark.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
renewiltord 5y ago
No Apple compares to the Envy Massive. Flavorful. Crisp. Looks like it was made in a GMO factory. Tastes like heaven. Envy über Apples.
Angostura 5y ago
I remember when I first visited the U.S on a press trip back in the 90s thinking how odd it was that all the fresh fruit I offered looked so good and tasted of so little. It wasn't just the red delicious apples, it was things like the strawberries too.
kieckerjan 5y ago
In a similar vein, I recently learned from Harold McGee's superb new book Nose Dive that modern flowers (the ones you are likely to buy from a flower shop) tend to smell less than their predecessors. This is because plants use the same metabolic pathways to make colors and smells, and if you optimize these pathways for colors, as we nowadays do, the smells suffer.
igammarays 5y ago
You probably don't even know what real vegetables taste like. As a Canadian born and raised who moved to Ukraine a few years ago, one of the most surprising things I encountered was how tasty a simple salad can be. Then I found out that mineral levels in vegetables in North America are estimated to have dropped 90% since 1914 [1]. Ukrainians who migrate to other countries are often heard to complain about a loss in food taste - and I know exactly what they're talking about because I'm a foreigner who noticed the difference in food taste right away. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20965771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20965771 My old comment on the matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20969214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20969214
butterfi 5y ago
I just got back from Istanbul where the abundance of fresh beautiful produce made me want to slap the local Whole Foods vegetable buyer. I think we may have lost our way on how we buy and sell produce.
matttproud 5y ago
Growing up in North America by the time I became an adult, I had written off apples in entirety for being dull balls of coagulated sand consistency material. It was lost on me why anyone would ever voluntarily eat one. It didn’t matter whether mass market or where. Fast forward in life: two years after moving to Switzerland, I found myself hungry and desperate while on the road, expecting the worst. I ate one of the domestic varieties grown in Thurgau (der Apfelkanton or apple mecca). Absolutely blown away by the freshness and flavor profile. My takeaway is whatever is calling whatever is sold in the US as an Apple is a crime. A similar thing happened to me here with milk (it didn’t have a lingering bleach or watered down aroma) and using buses for transit. I think North America scarred me.

275 points by kareemm 5y ago

> “It turns out that a lot of the genes that coded for the flavor-producing compounds were on the same chromosomes as the genes for the yellow striped skin,” Traverso explains, “so as you favored the more consistently colored apples, you were essentially disfavoring the same genes that coded for great flavor. This is also why so many cultivars of tomato and cucumber taste like moist cardboard. Once you taste what they’re actually supposed to taste like, you’ll never be able to go back to a shrink-wrapped English cucumber grown in a hot house.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wwweston 5y ago
What's a good cucumber alternative and how do I get a hold of it?
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Look for regional producers or farmers markets. I’m lucky to live in upstate NY with ready access to farm stands about 30 minutes away. Usually smaller producers make different choices in terms of variety.
  - quantified 5y ago
    The US Northeast has so many apples that don’t travel well and have so much flavor: Spenser, Macoun, Empire... on the West Coast they’re all lacrosse balls that taste OK to decent but mainly travel well.
    - Spooky23 5y ago
      Everyone complains about the northeast re: weather, etc. But there’s a ton of stuff like this that many of us who live here take for granted!
      - quantified 5y ago
        I miss that aspect of New England. Agriculture there is much more local. Apple picking in the fall was a delight.
- dheera 5y ago
  Ideally get "Japanese cucumbers" from a Japanese grocery store, or get the "Persian cucumbers" from any grocery store that has decent typography in its logo (yes there is a HUGE correlation between logo typography and cucumber quality in my experience).
- SEJeff 5y ago
  https://www.rareseeds.com/store/vegetables/cucumbers https://www.rareseeds.com/store/vegetables/cucumbers Bakers Creek only sells heirloom seeds (no cultivars). I get most of my garden seeds from them as they have the lineage of the seeds they sell available.
  - koolba 5y ago
    These seeds are amazing. The Beit Alpha cucumbers are fantastic and the Purple Bumble Bee cherry tomatoes are some of the greatest I’ve ever eaten.
  - jtc331 5y ago
    Heirloom varieties (more properly “open pollinated”) are themselves cultivars, which just means something that was selected/bred/domesticated. I think you’re trying to get at “hybrids” (which just means the breeding isn’t stable, i.e., the next generation isn’t first red to match the parents, but even hybrids can be quite tasty. The issue isn’t the breeding process per se; the issue is selectively breeding for the wrong things (or a single thing instead of a mix of things).
Eric_WVGG 5y ago
Nearly nobody under the age of 35 is aware that popcorn used to taste like corn. Not like modern ears of corn, which are bred mostly for sweetness; more like tortilla chips, whose corn is still (somehow) cultivated for corn flavor. Corny. [edit] … also I’m baffled by how, every time I “hold the tomatoes” on my burger or salad, someone will invariably say “don’t you like tomatoes?” and I have to go on this dumb rant about how the flavor has been bred out. Like, all these people have had marinara sauce and even ketchup, which are made from varieties of tomatoes that are still cultivated for flavor (and thus unsuitable for long-distance shipping). They know what tomatoes actually taste like!! yet still eat these slices of pink tomato that somehow have less flavor than American cucumbers and think “this is the same thing”
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  i too stopped ordering tomatos for this reason some people mentioned looking for places that advertise using heirloom tomatos, but you still have to give them a good pinch of salt would love to join a startup that re-engineers flavor back into commercially-viable crops
  - titzer 5y ago
    Just move to Europe.
    - dnzkw 5y ago
      Sorry to tell you tomatoes are flavourless in Europe as well.
      - watwut 5y ago
        Yep. You have to grow own tomatoes to have good ones. Which is something only few people are willing and have option to do.
        hoseja 5y ago
sliken 5y ago
This is also why many AKC pure bred dogs have serious health problems. Turns of you select only on a simple metric like hair color, ear shape, of slope of the back, that you end up selecting for things that go against the very heart of what the breed was. So you lose characteristics that led to the breed in the first place.
- aix1 5y ago
  That, and inbreeding https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/although-purebred-dogs-can-be-best-in-show-are-they-worst-in-health/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/although-purebred... https://www.instituteofcaninebiology.org/blog/inbreeding-of-purebred-dogs-determined-from-dna https://www.instituteofcaninebiology.org/blog/inbreeding-of-...
throwawayboise 5y ago
With tomatoes, I thought it was more that most are not ripened on the vine, they are picked green so they ship better, then ripened artificially with ethelene gas. They turn red, but don't develop the same flavor or texture as a real ripe tomato. Same with strawberries.
leotaku 5y ago
Somehow I don't seem to have the same experience as most people in this thread. Sure, homegrown tomatoes and cucumbers taste quite a bit better than what I usually buy at the supermarket, but it certainly isn't perfect vs. inedible. Possible explanations I can think of: 1. My taste perception is just broken because I am relatively young and have been raised on low-quality produce. 2. My local supermarkets just happen to stock excellent vegetables (I live in Central Europe). 3. There are some extremely high-quality breeds of tomatoes/cucumbers that I have never eaten before. 4. Other people are simply more enthusiastic about vegetable quality and therefore their claims seem exaggerated to me.
- crazygringo 5y ago
  I think there are two things involved. First is that some produce really is terrible -- "regular" cheap tomatoes can be utterly flavorless. But on the other hand, a lot of supermarkets stock tomatoes that range from fine to quite excellent, e.g. cherry tomatoes grown in greenhouses sold on the vine. And second is that people really do exaggerate how great homegrown tomatoes are. There are tomato snobs in the same way there are coffee snobs, whiskey snobs, chocolate snobs, whatever. They insist something is 100x better, when really it's just 1.5x better, because for some reason that's important to them, part of their identity. Yes, a farmer's-market heirloom tomato is utterly delicious. But store-bought cherry tomatoes on the vine are also super super tasty. Even the ones not on the vine can be really really good. (You can also find really bad ones though, it depends on the store.) I'd go so far as to say they're just different, neither obviously better than the other.
- ido 5y ago
  Where in Central Europe are you? And are you buying the cheapest tomatoes available? The answer to these can vary results a lot.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  It’s pretty much this skit https://youtu.be/4ZK8Z8hulFg https://youtu.be/4ZK8Z8hulFg
- TroisM 5y ago
  Stores sell heirloom tomatoes too... sometime at twice the price though...
spfzero 5y ago
It’s not just flavor that has been bred out. Also nutrition, and not just from tomatoes. Consumers can not visually see flavor or nutrition. They can see color, size, and uniformity of surface texture and shape. So the vegetables are bred for what can be seen and immediately considered in a buying decision.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Some of it is just size, as in the larger sized produce might have a similar amount of nutrition per unit (per tomato or per berry) but not per pound, so the nutrition is diluted with fiber and water but still there. Though there are also a whole lot of edible plants out there that don’t hold up at all to distribution, if you aren’t picking it by hand and eating it the same day it will be ruined.
hazza_n_dazza 5y ago
Search for the good stuff https://tomatoeden.com/ https://tomatoeden.com/ There are many heirloom and flavour providers, put your money where your mouth is!

jbluepolarbear 5y ago

There are Apple orchards that were abandoned in Washington State that my dad use to to take us to. These orchards had only red delicious and they were the best apples I’ve had. There are a lot of abandoned orchards around Washington and old species keep getting found.

jay_kyburz 5y ago
I hated apples all thought my childhood, but once I had my own kids I started buying more interesting variety's (even just from the supermarket) and I'm really hooked. Love em. It might also help that I have tried to cut down on sugar and apples are now one of the sweetest things I eat. I also discovered that cutting apples into bite size chunks for kids makes them taste better!
- my_usernam3 5y ago
  If you haven't already, get one of those apple (and pear) slicers. I don't usually advocate for single purpose kitchen appliances, but these are life changing.
krupan 5y ago
Where in WA?
- jbluepolarbear 5y ago
  The ones I went to were near Okanogan Valley; though some could have been in Canada as well.

tipoftheiceberg 5y ago

Please support your local orchards if possible! The apples you find in stores don’t even compare to some of the unique cultivars you can find at many orchards

mark-r 5y ago
I live very close to where the Honeycrisp was developed, and sadly I don't frequent them or the other local orchards as much as I should.
nkozyra 5y ago
A big part of this is that a lot of varieties don't travel well. But commercial apples like ambrosia and honeycrisp do and are pretty tasty. Ubiquity of red delicious is sort of baffling. There's also a huge chunk of the country where apples don't grow well due to lack of sufficient freeze.
wyldfire 5y ago
Visiting orchards in Autumn was a fun annual tradition when I lived in the Northern US. The whole fam would enjoy those days together picking apples. No orchards nearby this part of Texas, though.

mark-r 5y ago

The Red Delicious stands out to me as the textbook example of the power of naming and marketing. The origin story is unbeatable. The power of a name on our perceptions is undeniable. Realizing all of this has been one of the most empowering discoveries of my adult life.

axaxs 5y ago
True, but it also sucks because so many people say 'i dont like apples', including me until my mid 20s. Red Delicious are awful in every metric. Once a friend opened my eyes to pink ladies and honeycrisps, I was blown away and felt..cheated somehow.
- smhost 5y ago
  It's crazy. I always subconsciously assumed that Red Delicious apples were how apples have always been (because they taste/look so much less appetizing than the other ones, therefore they must be the most "natural"), and that those other apples were genetically modified. And, being an immigrant, I thought it might even be a cultural difference, and that Americans just prefer the taste of Red Delicious. This is blowing my mind.
  - axaxs 5y ago
    IIRC, most apples aren't genetically modified as we use the term today, just 'hybridized'/crossbred or whatever the word is. I think they're also all sterile.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I've been throwing the cores out into the wild parts of the lawn for 20 years. None have germinated.
      - genewitch 5y ago
        birds love apple seeds and pepper seeds, though.

dmitryminkovsky 5y ago

This is a great account if you’re interested in fruit cultivars: https://mobile.twitter.com/pomological https://mobile.twitter.com/pomological

nostrademons 5y ago

Red Delicious was my favorite apple as a kid. Some of this might be questionable taste - my sister's favorite was a Mcintosh - but I wonder if they were better 40 years ago. Had one recently and it was underwhelming. My wife turned me on to Pink Ladies and Fujis and I'll never go back to Delicious.

whatever_dude 5y ago
The article is explicitly stating and explaining why they were indeed better 40 years ago.

ggm 5y ago

Apples, like Tomato are textbook examples of what mechanised volume production and warehousing does to "tasty". You can either have cheap food, or you can have good food, but good cheap food (where good means nutritious, delicious) is a lot harder and Cheap generally beats out good anyway, for most people. Remember in context, we probably waste over 30% of the produce along the supply chain, seeking absolutely "perfect" blemish free apples in a tray, wrapped in plastic, cheaper than before. Down here in Oz people have moved on from "organic is better for you" (debatable) to "I like it better" which being couched in the preference space, is less contestable. I do like things which taste bettter, and I am prepared to pay the premium to get them. I would be interested if the same process which took red delicious to stable, thick skinned, resilient also reduced nutritive value, we read increasingly that abundant food production often includes reducing actual food value (vitamins, minerals, antioxidents, flavones), in favour of mass production but I don't know how true it is.

wyldfire 5y ago
> Remember in context, we probably waste over 30% of the produce along the supply chain, seeking absolutely "perfect" blemish free apples in a tray, wrapped in plastic, cheaper than before. over the last fifty years (or more?) grocery stores have evolved to have onsite bakeries/etc that take food that looks unappealing or would otherwise spoil soon and make them into prepared foods. Ready to eat meals, prepped ingredients, etc. Though it's probably only down to 30% after efforts like these, though.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  Really? I had always assumed that unsold food gets thrown away (or maybe at a best case donated), and supply chains for bakeries etc are 100% separate by design.
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    The local supermarket sells whole roasted chickens that you can buy hot and ready to eat. The ones that don't sell are deboned and shredded and used for chicken salad, barbeque "pulled" chicken, etc.

koyote 5y ago

I think it's quite interesting that it's taken so long for a lackluster tasting food to decline in popularity. When I moved to the US from Western Europe, the relative difference in food quality was quite apparent and I distinctly remember noticing this first with the apples: At first I thought I might have chosen a bad batch, but after a couple of more buys I realised that these apples looked 'perfect' but always tasted foamy. I assumed what the article confirms: the apples were chosen for their looks and not their taste. What I think is weird about that mentality is that surely after the initial buy "oh these look declicious!", the consumer will try them and think "oh these don't taste good. I won't buy them again". Maybe it's just habit and it's taken a while for people to change that habit, especially if you never try anything different to compare it with. I know a lot of Americans that do not like apples because all they've ever had were the foamy ones.

smegger001 5y ago
Its not just the perfect look that Red Delicious was bred for but shelf life. Those things take forever to rot compared to other apples and hide bruising, but they end up with dry mealy texture and very thick waxy skin. They were optimized for apple sellers not apple eaters.
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  > They were optimized for apple sellers not apple eaters. The American food industry is optimised for sellers, not eaters [1]. It is that way because the scalar nature of capital in America favours national businesses, not local businesses (or nutritional well being). Consumers fit in with this model out of necessity because they are workers who cannot allocate enough time to food shopping, preparation, and cooking. Instead, they minimise the time spent on food procurement by going to the supermarket, which is the ultimate expression of scalar capitalism. [1] Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us ISBN1400069807 (ISBN13: 9781400069804), Michael Moss, Random House, 2013
  - smegger001 5y ago
    oh absolutely and it is all most economically optimal and rational thing to do for everyone involved. It is just soulless and dismal. each step of the way is rational in isolation, its when it all together that it becomes an awful abomination .

aetherson 5y ago

Envy apples are good.

brohoolio 5y ago
I do enjoy Envy apples but only if they are fresh. They fade faster than any other Apple I’ve encountered. By that I mean they lose their crispness and become undesirable. My personal favs are honey crisp and cosmic crisp, but I’d prefer an Envy only if it’s fresh.
smegger001 5y ago
I prefer pink lady, or opal apple myself. I used to eat a lot of golden delicious but the local stores haven't carried them regularly for several years around here.

every 5y ago

Uh, winesap please...

ithinkso 5y ago

Reinette were always my favorite apples, sort of popular in Poland but nor very 'presentable' [1]. Still, the best imho [1] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reneta#/media/Plik:Egremont_Russet_Apple.jpg https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reneta#/media/Plik:Egremont_Ru...

mcv 5y ago
Sounds (and looks) like the Goudreinet, the classic apple for Dutch apple pie.

WalterBright 5y ago

I thought it was just me that hated the Red Delicious. The Fujis and Granny Smiths seem to be going downhill fast. The Galas are ok. I planted my own apple tree 20 years ago. Some years I get some fruit that the deer missed, and those are awesome.

throwawayboise 5y ago
I like Granny Smith sliced with peanut butter. They are also pretty good for cooking.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jhgb 5y ago

Does this apply only to the US-grown apples, or is this a global problem? > When you picture an apple, you probably picture a Red Delicious Actually, I picture a Granny Smith. ;)

rsynnott 5y ago
Applies in Ireland; we don’t have the red delicious, but we do have the “golden delicious” (if consumer protection law had any teeth, these would be called “yellowish horrible” instead) and Gala and other Bad Apples. I think it may apply less in continental Europe.
- jhgb 5y ago
  By virtue of preferring green apples, I've only had a local Red Delicious a few times in the past, but I don't recall having had any problem with the taste - except for, well, being too sweet for me. I guess I'll have to buy some the next time I see them to see what the fuss is about (and if there is any fuss to be had in the first place).

axguscbklp 5y ago

I agree that supermarket fruits and vegetables often seem to lack in flavor but to my taste, Red Delicious is not worse than any other supermarket apple. All supermarket apples, even the sour ones, pretty much just taste like slightly different variants of sugar water to me - the sourness of the sour apples just rides on top of the sugar water taste without really displacing it. I do not know why Red Delicious specifically has been singled out as the target of multiple critical articles given that one could just as accurately write such articles about all sorts of produce. Do most people really think that other supermarket apples taste any better than Red Delicious?

smegger001 5y ago
because it doesn't even have the sugar water taste going for it. it been so over optimzed for appearance shape and shelf life that the texture has become unpleasant, the flavor is non existent, and for years it was "The Apple" you have generations that had one of those awful thing sent in their school lunch every day (and usually threw it away without a single bite), that have grown up had enough of this garbage apple and it is now emblematic of bad flavorless fruit and vegetable in stores.
- axguscbklp 5y ago
  I can taste the sugar water in Red Delicious and I actually enjoy the texture, but I understand the rest.
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    I specifically use them only for cooking. The extra sugar in the other apples can caramelize too quickly for many dishes.
wombatmobile 5y ago
Here in Australia the supermarket apples can be excellent. Tasty, crisp, juicy, sweet/tart, consistently reliable, and beautiful to look at. Do you have Jazz apples? They are the best.

fouc 5y ago

Damn breeders.. ruining apples and dogs over time. Always going for some aesthetic ideal over performance.

smegger001 5y ago
oh they bred for performance just with different metric than the consumer would prefer. they can sit on a shelf without rotting far longer than say a gala jazz or opal apple, they hide bruising, all great traits if you are a supermarket chain storing hundreds of thousands in a warehouse for months at a time waiting to send them out to stores over the course of a year between harvests.

irrational 5y ago

Good article, but the author’s conclusion is flawed. Pink Lady is the best eating apple ;-) (Before anyone brings up Honeycrisp - I do think it is the best saucing apple.)

mcv 5y ago

As a kid, I was a fan of Golden Delicious, while others criticised it for being too mealy. That wasn't my experience, at least at first. Eventually I encountered increasingly mealy Golden "Delicious", and started favouring other apples. Even the cheapest apples here, like Elstar and Jonagold, are pretty good in comparison. I wonder if it's the fate of any breed to eventually be bred for looks instead of taste. If you see two apples (or any other fruit or vegetable) of the same name, aren't you more likely to pick the tastier looking one? You can't taste them in the shop, but you can compare by looks. So eventually, that's what they end up being bred for. I'd expect the only way to protect an apple from that fate, would be to trademark the name, and the rightsholder only licenses the name to apples from cultivars that breed for taste and don't sacrifice taste for looks. This might be a case where IP rights might be used for good.

exDM69 5y ago
> I wonder if it's the fate of any breed to eventually be bred for looks instead of taste. No, fruit trees are predominantly propagated by cloning, by grafting branches into a root stock. This method has been used already in prehistoric times. New varieties are created by producing seeds, but then they are no longer called the same "breed". There is a big element of luck involved due to cross pollination and only specialized growers practice it. The issue you mention is common in plants propagated through seeds, such as tomatoes and carrots. Modern tomato varieties are red, big, robust in transport... and tasteless.
- wincy 5y ago
  There’s an interesting planet money podcast about the thousands of trees grown to find the honey crisp apple. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/episode-627-the-miracle-apple https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/epis...
- the__alchemist 5y ago
  I may be misinterpreting, but I think the comment you replied to implies natural(artificial?)-selection at the supermarket-selection level; not actual breeding of the trees.

MisterBastahrd 5y ago

I had a real sweet tooth as a kid and learned early on that a bruised Red Delicious was a sweeter apple, so I would take some apples from my parents' kitchen and bruise them all over and let them rest for a day. The result was not only sweeter, but more flavorful too.

dgan 5y ago

I absolutely love apples, and those Red Delicious are quite delicious No idea what the article is complaining about

sumtechguy 5y ago
Wonder if it is a regional thing? Maybe there are several varieties of red delicious? But they all get the same name? In the area I live in now they are fairly bland and do not taste very good. But when I was a kid we would goto nebraska city and get a couple of bushels of them and those were very good otherwise we would not have bought that many.
- ragingrobot 5y ago
  Most likely. If I go to the local produce market here in central NJ, when it's apple season they sell the local apples (in fact this particular market has it's own apple orchard). If you hold a Red Delicious from Washington State and one from Jew Jersey, they are obviously different in shape. The Washington apple tends to be the boxy, tapered apple we're familiar with. The NJ Red Delicious is a globe, looking more like a Honeycrisp or Winesap in shape with the coloring of a Red Delicious. The NJ has a sweeter (although not significanty so) taste unlike the bland Washington (and others).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

jefftk 5y ago

Since apples are propagated by grafting (cloning), has anyone kept original ("heirloom"?) Red Delicious stock from before it was optimized for looks? I'd be very curious to try one!

acdha 5y ago
If you go around local orchards, you'll see them from time to time — I've seen them in CT, MD, NY, PA, and VA. If they don't look like supermarket apples, they're worth eating.
derbOac 5y ago
I lived in Iowa for a time not too far from where they were originally from, and the red delicious apples there in local orchards on old trees are probably pretty close to what they were originally like. They're smaller than the prototypical ones you find in the grocery, with a thinner skin, more mottled or striped and round in appearance, and have flavor sort of like mcintosh. If you know what they are, you'll probably be able to identify the red delicious flavor, mostly in the skin I think. However, my guess is if you gave one to a bunch of people they probably wouldn't recognize them as red delicious apples. They might identify them as mcintosh or something like that.
dotcommand 5y ago
I recently watched a youtube video about why avocados cannot be grown by seed and learned about grafting. Interesting stuff. Didn't know apples also were grown through grafting.
- 3minus1 5y ago
  There's an interesting discussion in Gun, Germs, and Steel where Jared Diamond claims that wild apples were inedible (IIRC due to cyanide in the seeds) and could only be domesticated after the invention of grafting technology.
- tsjq 5y ago
  also give a read about those green apples. (Granny Smith?). IIRC, all of these are grafts from one single tree. cmiw pls .

legohead 5y ago

red delicious are great. for a while I was purposely buying different apples each week and checked my kid's reactions. turns out they like gala and red delicious the most.

LorenPechtel 5y ago

This is why a lot of people grow produce at home. Seeds/plants meant for home growing favor tasty over transportability and thus most garden produce is far superior to what the store sells.

whynotkeithberg 5y ago

I was a massive fan of red delicious as a kid... I remember I continued buying them up until about 5-6 years ago because I always remembered the incredible taste but it never seemed to match up with my memories. I read a similar article 5-6 years ago and that's when I finally stopped buying. Now I mostly buy Pink Lady or Honeycrisp. Although the new Cosmic Crisp apples are quite great too and they last forever in the fridge.

aVx1uyD5pYWW 5y ago

I find that red delicious actually tastes quite good if you manage to eat it before it becomes mealy. Sweet, juicy, crisp bite. The problem is just that they become mealy relatively quickly.

dotcommand 5y ago

That explains why red apples taste horrible but what happened to grapes? I remember when grapes were the dark bluish/blackish concord types and now, the supermarkets mostly carry green and purple grapes which taste awful in comparison.

tsjq 5y ago
similar story. good looking + lower costs + seedless = unintentionally optimised towards poor taste :(

swayvil 5y ago

I recommend the Pippin apple.

gowan 5y ago

imo the granny smith is the all time worse apple. always taste like a green apple (not trying to be ironic) and usually has a thick skin. just plain terrible might as well pick any apple variety before it is ripe. if you want a good green apple buy a newtown pippin.

quesera 5y ago
I like 'em crisp and tart (and cold), so Granny Smith from the refrigerator is my default. I recall Newtown Pippins being a bit sweeter than I like, but I understand they vary. Is there a time of year, or another way to select for tartness?
Tagbert 5y ago
I use the Granny Smith for cooking but not as an eating apple. They have a good texture and tartness for pies and apple sauce but they are not what i would want to eat raw.

mtnGoat 5y ago

I live in the "Apple Capital of the World", had to learn about apples my whole life. I'm not sure its a fair to make blanket statements about red delicious apples as many are not cloned/grafted, so the taste varies from producer to producer. The big name varieties of apples now are all copyright/trademark and grown via grafting, making output control much easier. Many of the older red del orchards are old and no longer profitable due to modern day orchard planting and management being much more advanced. As those orchards get replaced they get replanted or grafts from a currently more profitable variety are put into them. A reasonable amount of new varieties are growing on stumps/roots that once produced red delicious fruits. Rave and Ambrosia are the two variants Stemilt is pushing hard these days. the average now is around 12 years before they switch the varieties and put new grafts on a stump. seven years to get back to full production size, 5 years of product and then switch. the apple varieties being marketed today have been in the works for near a decade or more.

jader201 5y ago

I used to love apples. Until I realized that most of the ones I would buy ended up being mealy. It was like rolling dice as to whether one would be mealy. Maybe it’s because we started buying organic? We got some apples one time that weren’t organic, and they were great. If organic apples are too susceptible to being mealy, I guess I’d rather just eat other organic fruits vs. eating non-organic apples.

Tagbert 5y ago
A mealy texture usually means that apple is old and was not recently picked. Some varieties, like the red delicious of this article were bred to not get mealy as they age but at a cost. There is nothing specific about organic that would make the apples mealy but if they were varieties not bred for long life or if they were slow sellers due to price, you might get a high percentage of mealy apples.

barathr 5y ago

I'd encourage everyone to check out California Rare Fruit Growers generally, and specifically this list of apples from a tasting a couple years ago: http://mbcrfg.org/apple-tasting-2019-rankings/ http://mbcrfg.org/apple-tasting-2019-rankings/

ljm 5y ago

I haven't seen red delicious on sale in UK supermarkets for ages. I used to back in my childhood, when you had a variety of loose apples on sale. We bought red delicious and golden delicious because they were cheaper, and we got granny smith apples as a treat. I liked red more than golden for reasons I don't remember but I think red had a stronger crunch and a thicker skin. I really don't like over-sweet fruit and it feels like a lot of fruits have been engineered for extra sweetness. So these days I try and stick to boring/milder stuff like Braeburn or Gala. Even for other fruits, like strawberries, it's hard to find a punnet that isn't the 'supersweet' variety.

mastazi 5y ago

I was lucky that I could grow up in a family where we produced most of the food we ate[1]. The main thing I learned, is that the interests of food consumers and food producers are, and always will be, misaligned, unless you are the one producing the food you eat. When I was a kid, I used to despise supermarket food (I later learned to eat it out of necessity, once I moved out of my parent's place). Now I'm saving up so I can buy a homestead when I retire, and my dream is to produce food for me and my loved ones. [1] I grew up on a small farm and homestead in Italy, my grandparents and parents had a few money crops (olive oil, wine, eggs) and everything else on the farm was for our own consumption (veggie garden, orchard, meat chickens, pigs, rabbits etc.).

TazeTSchnitzel 5y ago

I assume this kind of disaster is why Pink Lady is a trademark.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

renewiltord 5y ago

No Apple compares to the Envy Massive. Flavorful. Crisp. Looks like it was made in a GMO factory. Tastes like heaven. Envy über Apples.

Angostura 5y ago

I remember when I first visited the U.S on a press trip back in the 90s thinking how odd it was that all the fresh fruit I offered looked so good and tasted of so little. It wasn't just the red delicious apples, it was things like the strawberries too.

kieckerjan 5y ago

In a similar vein, I recently learned from Harold McGee's superb new book Nose Dive that modern flowers (the ones you are likely to buy from a flower shop) tend to smell less than their predecessors. This is because plants use the same metabolic pathways to make colors and smells, and if you optimize these pathways for colors, as we nowadays do, the smells suffer.

igammarays 5y ago

You probably don't even know what real vegetables taste like. As a Canadian born and raised who moved to Ukraine a few years ago, one of the most surprising things I encountered was how tasty a simple salad can be. Then I found out that mineral levels in vegetables in North America are estimated to have dropped 90% since 1914 [1]. Ukrainians who migrate to other countries are often heard to complain about a loss in food taste - and I know exactly what they're talking about because I'm a foreigner who noticed the difference in food taste right away. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20965771 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20965771 My old comment on the matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20969214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20969214

butterfi 5y ago

I just got back from Istanbul where the abundance of fresh beautiful produce made me want to slap the local Whole Foods vegetable buyer. I think we may have lost our way on how we buy and sell produce.

matttproud 5y ago

Growing up in North America by the time I became an adult, I had written off apples in entirety for being dull balls of coagulated sand consistency material. It was lost on me why anyone would ever voluntarily eat one. It didn’t matter whether mass market or where. Fast forward in life: two years after moving to Switzerland, I found myself hungry and desperate while on the road, expecting the worst. I ate one of the domestic varieties grown in Thurgau (der Apfelkanton or apple mecca). Absolutely blown away by the freshness and flavor profile. My takeaway is whatever is calling whatever is sold in the US as an Apple is a crime. A similar thing happened to me here with milk (it didn’t have a lingering bleach or watered down aroma) and using buses for transit. I think North America scarred me.