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Comment by GnarfGnarf | Hacker News Reader

Ironically, you will never find the best-tasting apples in your local grocery store. The tastiest apples are often smaller, brown or dark skin, not the big red 'juicy' apples the uninformed consumer thinks are the best. Viz. the Red "Delicious", whose flavor was bred out in favor of color and appearance. It is now insipid and flavorless.

In the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, the humble-looking Cox Orange is sweet as candy, with a hint of pear. You can only get it from local suppliers.

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"Bred out" is a bit of a misnomer here. Apples varieties are propagated clonally through grafting. However, each new cloned tree originates from a single twig of a previous tree, and that twig originates from a single cell of the donor tree. Since cell division is not a perfect process, point mutations can accumulate over the generations from this process. In the case of Red Delicious, selections of point mutations (known as "sports") for storage life, color, and conical shape have resulted in the uninspiring, insipid thing we call a Red Delicious apple.

I have a tree of the original Delicious apple, which was a seedling found in an orchard near Sumner, Iowa, not far from where I live in NE Iowa. Preservationists have propagated this tree for minimal mutation. It is a slightly larger apple than commercial Red Delicious, ripens green with red blush, very firm, sweet with mild acidity, and moderate storage potential. Not my favorite apple of the 30 or so in my orchard, but one well worth growing.

Where you grow an apple also matters a great deal. Cox Orange Pippen may be great in Nova Scotia, which is not unlike it's Northern England home range, but it's a crappy apple in the mid-South, and can't be ripened reliably at all where I live.

> Not my favorite apple of the 30 or so in my orchard

Great answers throughout this thread. But this comment raises the obvious question: then which one is your favorite?

(my answer is usually Wickson Crab: https://www.orangepippin.com/varieties/crab-apples/wickson-c...)

Depends of course on the use to which I'm putting the apple. If I had to reduce to a single variety in the orchard, I'd probably grow Liberty (not an heirloom, but rather a university-bred disease resistant variety created in the 1950s). Great eating fresh off the tree (if, like me, you like a tart, but not overly tannic, crisp eater), makes great dried apples, and decent unfermented juice. I would choose Honeycrisp (an even younger variety) over Liberty, if it weren't so damned hard to grow well. For keepers, I'd go with Black Oxford. For pies, it's hard to beat Beacon or Charlamoff (which is known by at least a dozen different names that are all somehow or other derived from Charlemagne, or Carolingian). I also like Calville Blanc for pies.

> Ironically, you will never find the best-tasting apples in your local grocery store.

I'm not sure it's "ironic". I think it is a case of "you get what you optimize for".

Grocery stores optimize for:

* cost

* transportability

* shelf life

* appearance

And all for good reason! That's what makes money.

Doesn't matter if you have the best tasting apple in the world if shipping it on a truck destroys 90% of them and you can't sell the others before they go off.

And for chains don’t forget uniformity / repeatability.

There can be local variations but the chain usually wants a baseline for staples.

To be fair, to someone who was not born in the US and grew up eating apples from u-pick orchards, grocery store apples in CA have an awful apparence and shelf life and way too sugary taste, but this is likely a case of people buying what they are used to :)

There are u-pick orchards and farmers markets in California too.

We're seeing a similar "optimization" on the internet. In this case it's information that's being optimized.

We're getting information that's less useful and nourishing, more clickbaity, pandering and addictive.

We could say that the internet is turning Red Delicious.

I actually bought a box of Cox Orange online from this orchard in VT. They were good, but the descriptions are always better.

https://www.scottfarmvermont.com/coxs-orange-pippin

Salt Spring Island, BC also seems to have a big heirloom apple thing going on, for any Van folks. (ex: I bought a couple of trees from this orchard https://www.saltspringapplecompany.com/)

They're only good until December. They don't keep, so beware of how old the apple is.

Cox's Orange Pippin is indeed a great apple (and perhaps more importantly, a parent to a huge number of delicious and more tractable varieties), but it's hardly brown or dark - it looks like a textbook apple to me:

https://pomiferous.com/applebyname/coxs-orange-pippin-id-213...

And careful with "your local" anything on the internet - in the UK, in season, every single supermarket in the country has Coxes.

I heard the same thing about the American fig tree being basically candy compared to what we’ve got today.

It explains why carollers wanted figgy pudding so badly.

It’s the case of pretty much every grown food product. As a comment above it comes down to the incentives / optimisations of a grocery store.

In this case I think the American fig fell victim to disease more than optimization. But perhaps those are related too.

Disease is definitely a good point, some varieties have disappeared or severely contracted in range due to diseases and pests.

I’ll have to read up if the fig was a monoculture like bananas and therefore disease is kind of a consequence of what you’re pointing out.

Cox Orange is a mythical cultivar. In part because the marketing but yep, is known as royalty. Sadly is known also to pick any fungus disease in the list. There are probably best new varieties. As a rule, the better taste a variety, the faster it spoils (unless you cheat).

Any thoughts on the Arkansas black?

All "black" apples and red flesh apples are a little acidic. Arkansas black (is not really black) improves after storing it for some months. Not so good to eat directly from the tree.

There are apples to eat from the tree and apples to store for winter. Both groups are desirable to have.

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