Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible
newengland.com
newengland.com
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.
Usually smaller producers make different choices in terms of variety.
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).
[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”
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
It's actually fascinating - I remember my grandmother scooping out the seeds out of vegetables and drying them, to be used next year.
The villagers also traded them as apparently they had different varieties.
Southern Exposure Seed Exchange: https://www.southernexposure.com/
Seed Savers Exchange https://www.seedsavers.org/
Open Source Seed Initiative partners with multiple seed exchanges: https://osseeds.org/
But tbf, only for a few months when the many small farmers grow them outdoors and sell them for unbelievably cheap.
Rest of the time it's greenhouse tomatoes like everyone else.
In order to ship fruit long distance, they're harvested before they're ready, and artificially ripened in frozen containers. This lets them survive long journeys but kills a lot of the taste.
So your company would end up being a traceability and logistics one - what's the nearest place to your customers that grow fruit, how can you prove it, and how can you get it in their hands.
(Last two contracts were in artificial fruit ripening and supply chain traceability respectively).
I wonder what the science there is. You'd think the slower ripening in partial shade (often a week or more slower) would result in a more complex tasting tomato, but perhaps the flavor compounds never reach a critical mass.
Unfortunately, there is a large black market in mis-labeled San Marzanos, so it's not a full guarantee of quality. But it's something that they're at least working on, rather than just giving up.
What does that mean? Protected under what laws?
Protected under EU law. Only tomatoes of a specific type AND from the specific region can use the name "San Marzanos".
Outside the EU I don't think there is anything stopping yoou from labling any random tomato as "San Marzano".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_designation_of_origi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographical_indications_and_t...
"only this company can decide who can use the trademark"
It's like:
"only if it's production fulfills certain criteria can you use the name"
It's made as a consumer protection so that people can not just claim their product is this kind of "traditional" product when it isn't. Except that it's less used like a consumer protection as it's mainly used like a trademark. Controlled by a small group of people and directly profiting some regional government/economy.
Most commonly it requires the main ingredient to come from a specific region (also e.g. used for Wine or Sect).
EDIT: I kinda did throw different regulations into one explanation here.
Real cheddar is full of flavour, slightly sour. Great stuff.
But you can go to places like the US and cheddar is not cheddar and they should not be allowed to call that cheddar.
Unless you live in Russia :)
Which leads me to wonder if its really the genetic choices or is it just something about the farming, nutritional rich soils, or transportation/timing?
That said, it seems to be getting easier to get high quality vegetables (including tomatoes) here in the UK. It's not from a supermarket and you pay more, but it is available (maybe still not quite as good as other countries, but certainly much improved on the flavourless stuff).
- the soil plays no great role in taste but is of course the farmer most precious resource. - the plant genetics is preponderant in taste. - the consumers and farmer genetics and culture are loosely related to the plant genetics. - the missing pieces, distribution and seed providers, are the most important pieces, deciding on prices, margins and on the characteristics necessary of the products to improve those.
Local products are always best. But I can’t grow exotic fruits in Paris.
I live in Hungary and tomatoes are crap for 10 months a year, when they're generally imported from abroad and are obviously picked up unripe.
Then during the summer you can buy tasteful tomatoes for a while, sourced locally.
In Italy they're better on average, but you can also find tasteless dutch ones in supermarkets (again, picked up unripe).
Recently I tried Bull’s Heart, which were stupid expensive but delicious. But you can get San Marzano in a bunch of places, and various other plum and cherry varieties with good flavours.
It’s just the average “salad tomato” that tastes like crunchy water.
As a norther European, I've always found the tomatoes in the US far better than what I normally get.
The insect/worms/catepillars in my area are more vicious than rodent invasions. If you get catepillars, they can wipe out an entire plant in a day.
Your attitude is the problem - DONT equate $5 of supermarket tomatoes with an equivalent weight of home grown tomatoes.
I go out of my way to buy “expensive” tomatoes, because I don’t think of good tomatoes as being cheap produce, but more like an expensive vegetable (although price is still seasonal).
At the end of the day for new people trying gardening, it can be a bit disappointning. To make it all 100% magical panacea without actual realization of monetary factors, you're not being honest with potential new growers.
Maybe $15 total, plus water, time, and patience. The latter two of those can be expensive, but difficult to quantify.
[0] $10 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Pennington-12-in-Terra-Cotta-Cla...
[1] $5 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Miracle-Gro-Moisture-Control-8-q...
[2] $5 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Glamos-Wire-Products-54-in-Plant...
[3] $4 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Bonnie-Plants-19-3-oz-Early-Girl...
That's one plant, and we're at $25.
When I grew tomatoes in containers, I went for the 5-gal buckets from Lowes ($4), and bought soil in larger bags. Also your cage is more expensive than I recall paying.
On the plus side, most of those are one-time startup costs.
Our tomatoes are self-seeding at this point. We literally do nothing except pick them, and put away several dozen jars of sauce every year, from a couple neglected garden beds. It sounds like we have less trouble with pests here than you do though.
It's a typical reaction when suggestions that gardening can be more expensive than people realize. Yes, if you use the same pots, start taking seeds generationally, etc the price amortizes to near $0. That first year though can put a dent in a wallet. If you've been doing it for awhile, it's easy to forget.
We haven't even discussed getting into drip irrigation or similar. Each of the individual parts are cheap (tubing, sprayers/drippers, etc), but again it adds up with a timer etc.
To be abundantly clear, I'm not trying to dissuade anyone, but just giving realistic expectations. It's just like getting into Arduino and what not. The controller itself is cheap. The shields are cheap. Electronic components are cheap. Then you add up all your receipts and realize, you've spent more money than originally anticipated. It's just the nature of DIY.
So, per pot, you'll spend $20 in the first year by my (updated) math, then $5-10 each successive year -- and you'll get about $15 of produce each season. Sometimes much more than $15. Cherry/grape tomatoes are expensive, and the plants are more fruitful than the larger varieties.
Drip irrigation is out of scope. A minute or two, per container, per day, with a hose (or watering can) while you check for hornworms is the operational expectation.
Anyway I don't disagree with your larger point. Little things definitely add up. I've been to IKEA!
I also dislike plastic, but I liked the form factor of the bucket (straight vertical sides) to pack multiples into a small space. I still have the buckets 15 years later, and I use them for all sorts of misc jobs around the garden.
This was our first garden year. Very small plot, around 6'x6'. Deer knocked over our two tomato plants and ate every tomato off. Huge green tomatoes.
Container gardening on a (south-facing) high rise balcony works pretty well, though.
I have determinate dwarf tomato plants (3 feet tall max), which I grew from seed ($2.99), planted in old milk crates (free) lined with plastic from old bags (free) and filled from one huge bag of potting mix (~$20-30), and this gives me half a dozen plants that are superior to anything in a supermarket. I staked them with tree branches trimmed from my trees (free).
I have grown them in the actual ground many years, eliminating the cost of the potting mix, but after a few years, you need to let the soil lie fallow to avoid blights, so this year it's the milk crate planters.
Perhaps a regional thing.
Its a book about the incentives and technologies that came together to result in the deflavorization of food and the rise of the "flavoring" industry as a whole.
Of the interesting things in there is one guy using a mass spectrometer to identify flavor compounds at scale to engineer a tomato that is hardy and ships well without sacrificing flavor.
Although we’re very good at that here in NL
I'm more inclined to think that modern "grocery store" tomatoes are generally tomatoes that ship well while still fresh. Anything else means that tomatoes on burgers would not only be seasonal, but regulated to the sorts of places tomatoes can be shipped well from the farms.
I'm not even sure how you eat a good one daily, honestly. I've always lived in places with winter, and the tomatoes tend to lose any worth (cherry tomatoes might save you though). I used to grow or buy decent ones during the summer, but moved further north and that went away.
I think a lot of supermarket fruit and veg is picked underripe, and then ripening is induced in a controlled environment in some warehouse a few hours before it's sent to the shops, so that it's "perfectly" ripe as it's placed on display for sale.
(Hopefully you didn't establish this throwaway account to confess your controversial tomato opinions.)
Their HN account is better curated than most tomato cultivars.
Why not just say "no, I don't like tomatoes" and save the effort? Nobody has to justify why they like or dislike the things that they do.
Same with strawberries.
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.
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.
The answer to these can vary results a lot.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/27/410085320/epis...
Actually, you can ask to sample apples. I make pies, and sometimes stores carry unfamiliar varieties, so I do occasionally ask. The kids often don't know that this is okay, so it helps to ask for the Produce manager. They'll grab a knife and cut a slice. Otoh grocery stores rarely carry ugly apples; they go to farm markets, where it's way more normal to ask for a sample
I also have some luck going by looks, but by specifically looking for exemplars that have flawed looks (in ways that I know don't negatively affect flavour). For types of produce where you can sort of tell which ones are good, other people tend to go for the ones that look good but also don't have blemishes. That selection process results in the good ones being statistically overrepresented among the ones with flawed looks.
So I'm happy to report that they still exist. The trick is getting hold of them...
i think part of the problem is that farmers pick them to early so your usually getting an green golden that has rotted a bit to turn yellow.
I have always looked for the more multi colored ones, skipping the all red because they had a history of tasting less delicious.
You may want to look at the European D.O.C./A.O.C./E.T.C. system. Some specify production methods. Others set testable thresholds for the final product. Either ruleset could be incorporated into a licensing scheme.
strawberries are like the blandest thing when they are out of season.
As all in its group, post-mature is mealy and bland, and before maturation is too acid, but freshly picked in the right month is a refreshing mix of acid/sweet in the right amounts. Really fine apple when in season.
But is really annoying to culture. Many of the best tasting apples are prone to fungus diseases that destroy its market value. GD is a sucker for skin diseases and the newer cultivars are better performers, so is in decline.
Apples in the kitchen burn its sugars to keep the fruit 'breathing' and the metabolism of the seeds working. The more time you have it, the more insipid.
>This might be a case where IP rights might be used for good.
Arent they doing that with the cosmic crisp?
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.
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
What you're saying makes a lot of sense though. I equally remember having a loaf of square bread that comes in plastic (called 'toast bread' in a lot of Europe) lying around for over a month and I could not spot any mould and it was also still soft. It did not taste like 'real' bread even when fresh of course...
If this is true we have some kind of tragedy of the commons within the growers of a specific variety. If the variety is still popular and known for good taste and your apples look the best, you win. Consumers won't pay enough attention to recognize that a given variety from a particular grower now tastes less good.
We have started getting apples in the UK (Tesco) that are often "foamy", almost powdery in their consistency. I assumed that it was some growing method that produces it as the same variety sold under the same label will sometimes have it and sometime not. I wondered if they're really old apples that the appearance of has been preserved; like we get softer potatoes that are actually last seasons and often have green patches where roots have been cut off. We changed to buying from Lidl and their fruit doesn't seem to have the same issue, so far, YMMV. The kids will squeeze the apples to make sure they're the nice ones, and one claims he can smell the good ones; visually they're identical (to me).
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.
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.
I say this as someone who worked Deli at Publix/Kroger and made those rotisserie chickens.
The unused chickens would get used for chicken salads and stuff like that, but we also threw alot of them away too. Everything the deli used at Publix was used just for the deli, at no point did we take stuff about to expire and use it for our stuff except for bread that had only a couple of days left from the bakery. We had our fridge and supply section and the grocery had their own section and the two rarely met.
Depends on the grocery chain, but many places use separate stock for them.
Note: link about effort to revive tomato taste. That they succeeded is my personal judgement - ie, I think tomatoes taste good again.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/geneticists-qu...
The problem here is that groceries are tailoring their product not for the eater of the food, but for the buyer of the food. That results in a lot of vegetables/fruits being thrown away even after they’ve been selectively bred to look good vs tasting good.
If the consumer was better educated and did not turn down food that did not look different, there would be a lot less wastage and the food would not need to be selectively bred to look good, but rather to taste good. Which means the food would taste better and less wastage would mean it’s cheaper.
The best vegetables are ones that are fresh out of the garden and ripened appropriately.
That scenario really isn't compatible with the types of places tomatoes find themselves to be for sell at. Which is to say probably in a city very far from where they were grown.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20965771
My old comment on the matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20969214
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!
The apples you find in stores don’t even compare to some of the unique cultivars you can find at many orchards
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.
> When you picture an apple, you probably picture a Red Delicious
Actually, I picture a Granny Smith. ;)
I think it may apply less in continental Europe.
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).
[1] https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reneta#/media/Plik:Egremont_Ru...
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.
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.
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.
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.).
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.
(Before anyone brings up Honeycrisp - I do think it is the best saucing apple.)
This is just a problem of lack of familiarity with the space. Crab apples are indeed much less palatable than Red Delicious apples.
I buy honeycrisp only for its texture, so I can't comment on the sweetness ratings as it's not my thing.
Although its ability never to oxidize and turn brown feels downright unnatural. You can leave a cut cosmic crisp on the counter for days and it just stays yellowy white. Weird.
However, I find cripp's pink to be wildly variable. Some are beautifully crisp and very tart, these are my favorite. One store by me sells them and they just taste like red delicious, despite having the color and whatnot.
The sourness of Cosmic Crisp is probably why it doesn't oxidize readily.
Eh.... the Red Delicious's twin in naming is the Golden Delicious. Golden is a more prestigious description than red by any standard, and they're both "delicious". If you want to credit naming and marketing with the success of the Red Delicious, you need to explain why the Golden Delicious didn't succeed even more.
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.
Do you have Jazz apples? They are the best.
My personal favs are honey crisp and cosmic crisp, but I’d prefer an Envy only if it’s fresh.
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.
Massive. Flavorful. Crisp.
Looks like it was made in a GMO factory. Tastes like heaven. Envy über Apples.
if you want a good green apple buy a newtown pippin.
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?
No idea what the article is complaining about
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).