I think I read somewhere that Red Delicious used to actually be good, but they bred it to be better for mass-production and long-term storage at the expense of taste and texture.
I remember them being good when I was a kid. Not sure if my taste was shit, if they really did take a tumble in quality, or a little bit of both.
I'm a xennial, on the cusp between millennial and Xer, btw, so I'm not young young, especially with how this site skews, but I'm not talking about a very long time ago, either.
I think that's just an urban legend. Fun fact about apples is that the common varieties are all grafted clones of its original tree! Naturally occurring apples are generally not all that large or sweet... but occasionally there'll be genetic mutation that makes a tasty variety!
If you plant seeds from an apple, you'll generally get a tree that yields very sour apples that doesn't resemble the original apple you ate!
Heck yeah! Add some sugar and you've got a one-of-a-kind delicious tangy sweet and sour applesauce you can't buy in stores! They're just not so great for snacking on by themselves.
It has to be real. I loved the shit out of them when I was a kid in the 80's. I ate R&D's like it was the last food on earth and they were so fucking good. Now they taste like ass.
Call me a granny snacker because Granny Smith never leaves my fruit bowl
Where my cosmic crisp gang at
Seriously try one. They came out last year and it's like honey crisp on roids
I came in here to say that op has clearly never had a cosmic crisp. It's the perfect apple.
Just make sure you ring them up as red delicious at the self scanner to save a bunch of money.
yeah plu 4016 baby
although the cosmic crisp freezer backlog has come online. They taste worse but only cost like $3.50 a lb, which is the same as honey crisp basically
Reds keep in nitrogen storage better than any other apple. Honeycrisp is notoriously biennially bearing, pest susceptible, and difficult to pack without damaging. Are you trying to feed the people, or are you more concerned with having the most pleasurable apple eating experience? Because they both look the same coming out the other end.
I agree, but wouldn't a tasteless nutritional slurry be even better?
I guarantee there are other apple varieties that are more suitable for storage.
The recent cosmic crisp out of WSU is promising, but harvests so far haven't been large enough to see if they can keep like reds in the real world. In the last couple of decades most years only reds are available in August before new crop. Another development has been new varieties bred to fruit very early -first week of August early. There's a few of those, mostly licensed to individual growers through modern fruit intellectual property agreements. Early varieties reduce the need for long storage, but increase the risk of crop loss to late frosts and early spring moisture.
There must be some sort of happy medium between the two extremes, right?
Fujis? Galas? Something else?
Edit: Fuck, I'm an apple centrist.
If you're trying to feed the people, why are you growing les pommes des arbors and not les pommes de terre?
This comment is really representative of a conservative trend in the communist movement. Marx was talking about ending the division of labor and making labor life's prime want. The russian revolutionaries used to talk about a country controlled by soviets.
But now a lot of folks seem to accept the cold war anti communist dichotomy between a capitalism of beautiful scarcity and a communism of dull sufficiency. This forgets the Venezuelan project to communize the economy. It forgets that the Soviet school system embraced dewian pedagogy and created a public school system unrivaled in its humanism. This trend don't seek an apple tree in every square, but plantations of efficent, bland apples.
Uhh major apple regions tend to be in places where the soil is too poor to grow potatoes. It's a thing you can do in places with harsh winters, rocky soil, and steep grades.
Sure. I'll discuss this with you further if you'd like, but I don't want to lose sight of the apples here.
Both apples and potatoes are excellent durable crops, but are best suited to different growing regions.
Within good apple growing regions, choice of variety should take many factors into account -things like resilience to present climate conditions, staggering harvest timing, maintaining genetic diversity, providing fruit for different uses (eating, cooking, juicing, fermenting, etc.), and good storage/shipping durability. Whether these factors are prioritized by individual growers in a market or by some central planning authority, I argue that durability should not be undervalued. Red delicious apples really are amazing in their rot resistance, and should be celebrated as such.
I am optimistic that in our lifetimes we will see new better tasting apple varieties eclipse the red delicious as a durable, long-storing staple fruit. We should not have to choose between variety and abundance, but we should also be realistic about our agricultural capabilities. In my estimation, capitalism is a huge hinderance to the development and widespread adoption of new apple varieties. The university breeding projects are often underfunded, and when they do produce promising scions/rootstocks, the legal right to grow and market them is restricted by unnecessary and counterproductive intellectual property claims. I dream of a communist future with greater apple abundance and variety for all people in every season of the year. Will you join me, comrade?
This is the kind of thinking I think we should often scaffold our thoughts with. I like this new framing, bringing forward the virtues of red delicious without downplaying the honeycrisp, and hoping for a beautiful symthesis
