How we got apples that taste delicious (2015) [audio] | Hacker News Reader

How we got apples that taste delicious (2015) [audio]

npr.org

26 pointsTomte18 comments

But we don't have apples that taste delicious.

I eat maybe one or two good ones in a year, and l spend a lot of time finding quality food sources. Most of the fruits and vegetables sold are tasteless garbage, and the vast majority of the people around me have no idea it is as they don't have the time or interest to spend the tremendous energy necessary to acquire decent food.

And I live in the country side of southern France where it's easier than anywhere else.

People then assume they don't like fruit or greens. They don't have any problem. The problem is that the shiny red perfectly shaped plastic apple looking product they sell you is a joke. And the heart attack worthy ice cream is tasty.

People writing this kind of article don't cook, never had a grand father with a garden or use their brain so much they forgot how their tongue, nose and palate work.

I think we do have tasty apples, but the red delicious certainly isn't one of them. Pink lady apples aren't bad.

Same with oranges, the cheap ones (navelinas) are sweet but they taste of nothing and really are only good for juice. Sicilian red oranges on the other hand have a stronger taste, they are great. I have never tried a blind test but I am pretty sure I could pass it.

A red delicious is an excellent apple - if you have it ripe off the tree. My parents have an older tree (20+ years) and a ripe apple from that is, quite frankly, amazing. Sweet, but not overly so. Crunchy, slight mineral flavour adding depth. Really nice.

The problem comes when they're picked early and left to ripen off-tree or they're picked too late. Either way they become a mealy mess after a few days. However, in this condition, it still looks great and the dark colour disguises any obvious bruising. This is probably why it's so prevalent in retail chains.

It's not that common in Europe. In Italy, which has some of the biggest apple orchards, the cheap variety is the Golden Delicious or the Royal Gala.

By the way, the mechanics of the organization behind those orchards are insane. It's an organization of thousands of farmers from the same valley (val di Non), with agronomists that decide when to harvest depending on the altitude and the variety. Apples brought a lot of wealth and infrastructure, since the valley roads had to be updated for the tricks. The organization even bought an old mine to have a 10 km tunnel at constant temperature in which to store apples.

> Pink lady apples aren't bad.

This. This is the whole problem.

Apples are not supposed to be "meh".

There are over 7,500 known cultivars of apple[1] many aren't suitable for eating raw, but grown for cooking and making cider, bust most are bred for eating.

So there's bound to be a lot that you might find unappealing but have a sizeable following anyhow.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple

I'm surprised that you live in France and say the fruit is tasteless. Whenever I visit France from the UK, I am always impressed by the French people's willingness to go taste over convenience. Visit a French supermarket and the fruit will give the impression that they were ripened in the field - they'll be on the verge of being over-ripe, luscious and sticky. They supermarket will smell of ripening fruit

Typically, when I travel to the US, I find the produce look gorgeous but taste of very little. The UK seems to straddle the middle.

Let's say that France as a broken leg and US has cancer. Still I like to walk on two legs.

The fact is so many people, even in France, have no idea what a good tomato taste like. So they buy something they don't hate and label that good.

I wonder exactly how the free market is spoiling our food. I mean, consumers would pick the best tasting food, right? Or do they pick the best looking food? Or is there somehow no competition in supermarkets? Or does the average consumer just not care enough?

For one thing, consumers favoring the convenience of supermarkets means choice gets limited to what large scale agribusiness can supply profitably. Local species and cultivars whose horticulture does not scale well, whose harvest can't be mechanized, which have a short ripeness window, which only produce crops rarely or under ideal conditions, and/or are too delicate to transport over long distances, don't fit with agribusiness production and supply models (nor with the patented GM sterile seed industry that is ever more forced on small scale farmers).

If you negate that list, you get a list of traits agribusiness tries to breed into more conventional plants often at the expense of optimal tastiness.

Yet the "reject" plants might be super delicious and perfectly suited to local soil and climate conditions and to traditional agricultural practices and regional cuisines...

In Malaysia as a child the roadside markets offered incredible local fruits like tampoi, certain distinctive cultivars of mangoes, langsats, salak, mangosteen, little-known species of durian and other jungle fruits, and many others that are much harder or impossible to find today. (Although the commercial varieties of mangoes, durian etc. are still very good if you know about seasonal variations and exactly where they're grown; and, according to my palate at least, the fresh produce available in S.E. Asia still far, far surpasses the range and quality available in northern Europe.)

It's a mix of a lot of things. Prices. Convenience. Lost of knowlegde about food and cooking. The family split. The mass food production. Marketting and advertising. Improvment in chemistry. Cultural shift. Mechanization. Offer and demand. Glibalieatio. Demography. Like any complex issue it doesn't have one only cause.

I know I can buy so-so apples any time of year for very cheap. But I can also buy very delicious apples in season for a higher price. I can't say if the free market has spoiled my food unless I know the quality:price of apples in the past. I somewhat struggle with the option between poor:cheap and delicious:expensive, but overall I think it's best to have more choices and have confidence in making the decision for myself.

You know the season of apples, which makes you part of the 1%.

This helped me put in context this more recent piece about another trademarked apple, the cosmic crisp. http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/05/03/525421226/was...

Edit: to summarize, there are lots of different apple varieties that have been trademarked and which therefore can only be sold with that brand name by growers in the "club" which controls the brand. They do so in the hope of being able to make a sustainable profit on a differentiated product, rather than selling a commodity which tends to drive profits to zero.

Seems blueberry growers could learn a thing or two about this tactic given their profits have tanked and some ponder exiting the market[1] as more growers entered the market.

[1]http://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/fear-losing-bluebe...

Until I read your comment it had not occurred to me that there could be different varieties of blueberries, but of course there can.

In addition to wild cultivars which some people say can be great, commercial ones tend from sweet, juicy to tart and watery tasteless, smallish and big. Of course they are susceptible to terroir (soil chars and climate) etc. There are quite a few to choose from[1].

[1]http://berrygrape.org/blueberry-cultivar-selection/

Commodities don't drive profits to zero. What they do is drive the least efficient operations out of business which looks to those companies like the profits go to zero. But, overtime someone is generally profitable when average over a few years.

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