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Comment by timcobb | Hacker News Reader

I was in Paris this past summer for the first time in a long time. In fact, it was my first time out of the US in a long time. I was stunned/disappointed by the fact that even in high-end produce stores, all the apple varieties were pretty much exactly the same ones we have in the US. Gala, Fuji, Red Delicious, Golden, Granny Smith, etc., the familiar line-up. The whole time I was in Paris, I did not encounter an unconventional apple type, and I went to many produce and grocery stores during my time there. I assumed that produce monoculture wouldn't have hit France as hard as it's hit the US... but no, it seemed just as bad there.

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Wrong season, the best time is really september, october. Even in Paris, it should be relatively easy to find Belles de boskoop and reine de reinettes which are delicious.

Otherwise, any farmer’s market in Britany and Normandie will have plenty of interesting apple varieties.

The problem though is that those more unconventional cultivars tend to only be available seasonally.

I can't speak to the grocery stores, but I did briefly work on an apple farm in Calvados. They had two dozen different kinds of apples, not one of which I'd ever heard of.

(I did once get a very lame baguette at a Monoprix once. Blew my mind that the French tolerated it.)

One possibility is that you were there out of season. We've gotten very good at preserving apples for all year, but they are harvested only for a month or so. It takes industrial climate control to make them taste good after about December.

I understand that this probably refers to a French grocery store of some sort, but I can't get the image out of my head of you ordering a baguette off of the localized French version of https://www.monoprice.com/.

Monoprix is a strange store that sells Food, Clothes, Household Items etc...

Kind of like Target.

Isn't that most supermarkets?

Nope, at least in the other supermarkets it's more like 80-90% Food the rest is the other stuff, in Monoprix it's the other way around

> Calvados

As in, where the brandy comes from? I never knew it was eponymous. Booze is of course the original technology for preserving apples and fruit in general. My understanding is that was the original intended purpose for our older orchards included those planted by Johnny Appleseed.

The calvados beverage is not only made in the Calvados departement. There are 3 different appelations: - regular calvados made from cider from different parts of Normandy - calvados Pays d'Auge which must be made from cider of that eponymous Pays d'Auge area (which is within the Calvados departement) - calvados du Domfrontais which is made from cider of the Domfront area in the Orne departement.

Since he didn't graft, the fruit from the trees he planted would have mostly been unpleasant to eat. But still fit to ferment alcohol from, or feed to livestock.

>Johnny Appleseed

Reminds me of Luther Burbank:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luther_Burbank

> I did once get a very lame baguette at a Monoprix once. Blew my mind that the French tolerated it.

We tend to buy bread in supermarkets only in case of dire emergency. Statistically, there probably was a much better bakery around the corner from that Monoprix.

> It takes industrial climate control to make them taste good after about December.

I remember my grand mother keeping apples in her cellar (cold but not freezing, dry, close to constant temperature year round). The apple she put there were fantastic long into winter. They would not look great, slightly shrunk and with wrinkles, but the taste was excellent. Industrial climate control is to keep them look good, not to keep them taste good.

Apples are a poor choice to look at, because much like avocados they are all grown from cuttings and grafts.

Apples are also an odd fruit because they can be kept for such a long time: https://www.foodrenegade.com/your-apples-year-old/ this makes shipping them anywhere much easier than a tomato...

Why does being grown from cuttings and grafts make them a poor choice to look at? Wouldn't there be local varieties with different flavors that people would want to consume. You can cut and graft those just the same? It seems they optimized for the varieties that are easier to ship and preserve.

Why would you assume that France has a diversity of apples? (they may--but I wouldn't automatically expect it)

Johnny Appleseed is American. The US has a huge diversity of apple trees based on locality.

However, like so many things, said diversity is seasonal. There is a good reason for pressing apple cider--you need to do something with the enormous number of apples you couldn't eat directly.

If you want apples out of season, you're only going to see the mass-manufactured ones.

Very true. In Austria you can still get a lot of heritage apples but mostly in the fall. Some varieties don’t keep well at all.

What does Jonny Appleseed have to do with anything? Apples are native to central Asia, not the Americas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple?wprov=sfla1

The point is that Johnny Appleseed actively spread apple cultivars over a very wide geographic area (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and parts of West Virgina and Ontario).

Since these cultivars were no longer connected by breeding, they changed characteristics over several centuries giving rise to an absolutely enormous diversity of local apple types in the US--especially since apple trees from seed are kinda unstable genetically.

How is where they are native to relevant prevalence and diversity?

For the same reason we have 1 banana and mostly only see hass avocados.

IF you take the seeds of a tomato you will get a mostly decent tomato out of it. IF you take the seeds of an apple or a haas avocado you will likely get something that looks nothing like its parent. Unlike tomatoes it takes a LONG time to grow a tree, so if you want an avocado or apple orchard your going to use grafts to make sure you get the best chance of having a good product in 5 or 10 years...

The economics of commonality should be readily apparent... pick something that you know works for your multi year bet to pay off sounds like a good plan.

Avocados are also interesting because we DO get other varieties due to how it reproduces (you need plants of both sexes). IM fairly sure that apples do not have this issue so farms are monocultures.

Add on to that the fact that the varieties we see are designed to be kept long enough to have a birthday and this is what you get.

apples themselves, all on their own, don't "breed true". If you take seeds from an apple from a tree that you love and plant them, you will not get a tree that produces fruit that tastes the same. The majority of apples "born" are sour. When a tasty apple tree is grown, it's a small miracle, and cuttings are propagated from it because it's the only way to produce more apples that are good.

Johnny Appleseed walking through colonial American planting apple trees? he was a hippy promoting more fermentation of alcoholic apple cider, for which sour apples work just fine.

virtually all French wine grapes, btw, are grown from cuttings grafted onto American root stocks because the native roots were not resistant to the invasive Phylloxera fly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phylloxera

it is because of grafting that we have variety in these cases.

How they are grown has nothing to do with what varieties are grown and sold. Apples are in fact a great example of fruit that has hundreds of centuries-old varieties that are no longer traded commercially bc of homogenization of consumer taste.

It is a little more complicated for apples because apple seeds do not breed true. You get random crabapples on average, if you plant apple seeds, so all commercial apples are grafted. At least apples aren't in the same deadend that bananas are in..

ie, most of the time they won't be sweet eating apples- in the US in particular this used to be less of a problem, because apples were for cider / alcohol. During prohibition entrepreneurs got active in trying to save their industry (while others were just ploughing orchards over) and we get modern ideas like "an apple a day" and the whole modern sweet eating apple became very mainstream. Not that eating apples weren't a thing before that, but it helped explode their popularity in modern western eating habits.

in the US, especially at "organic" grocery stores such as Whole Foods, you can typically get various weird apple cultivars -- although usually newly-developed rather than traditional. worth checking out if you like apples.

I've never noticed interesting apple cultivars in places like Whole Foods. I've noticed apples that had different names, but looked and tasted like Gala apples :).

Depending on your region, worth checking your local farmer's markets, food coops, and/or produce markets during fall-winter. There are multiple stalls in my town that have 15-20 apple varieties, only a few of which are "greatest hits" from grocery stores (pink something or other, jonagold). I have no doubt there is at least a sprinkling of heritage varieties in there.

> There are multiple stalls in my town that have 15-20 apple varieties

I just checked the websites of about half a dozen orchards within a reasonable driving distance from me, and they all had a range of 30-40 varieties. Not all will be ripe at the same time; 15-20 all at once is going to be a huge orchard!

Newly-developed apple varieties dominate because they have been carefully selected for maximum production, storage and transport qualities, appearance, etc., etc.

However, if you want to see some truly weird apples, heirlooms offer way more interest and variety if you can find them. (This probably involves making friends with people who have old trees, rather than finding a shop that sells them.)

For example, I live on an old family farm with an heirloom apple variety (unknown name, if it was ever named at all, but dating back to at least the 1850s) that is spicy and bubbles/fizzes when you bite into it. It's quite cool, and I think it is something some people would want to buy, but it is unsuited to modern commercial production for a few reasons; for example, it fruits on new wood at the tips of the branches, which makes it less suited to modern tree pruning strategies (all modern apple varieties fruit on older wood, which makes them much easier to prune).

I can't speak to french apple grocery store selection, but I wonder if you should maybe go to a different grocery store in the US. In my area (SF Bay Area) at the most common grocery chain (Safeway) there are probably 8 or so varieties of apples on sale and they often rotate. I would say that they always have the common ones that you describe (Red Delicious, Gala, Fuji, Granny Smith), some less common ones that are there 80% of the time (Honeycrisp, Pink Lady) and then some more exotic ones that rotate (this time they had two I had never tried before - Pazaz [I had to check twice to make sure they didn't say Pazuzu] and Sugar Bee). The Sugar Bee's were incredible - firm, crispy, juicy and sweet with just a small hint of tartness. Beyond just the bulk loose apples, they had a bunch of weird apple "products" that were either packaged up or sold in a bag. The weirdest ones were apple "bites" which were just tiny little apples - no variety specified.

In my experience, the average US grocery store has a vast selection of produce and I see the pattern with apples (standard base varieties, with some rotating specials) across most categories of produce - citrus, cucumbers, peppers, root veggies, etc.

So in short, I dunno, I actually feel like there's a massive variety of agricultural products in the US. Certainly way more than in Switzerland, the country in which I've been to the grocery store the most outside of the US. Coop has like 3 kinds of apples, Migros was a bit better and had some interesting Kanzi apples which I had not seen in the states.

YMMV ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In most of france produce markets are where you'd go for this, but you're rigidly tied to the seasonal production. So you can get all kinds of apples! In september and october. And no apples at any other time.

I'm not sure this applies in paris though, I suspect it does not. It's such a big city it's likely the markets are similar to american ones, being targeted & priced at affluent upper middle class professionals. IDK though I have spent very little time in paris.

Where could I find this in France?

Towns and small cities will just have a permanent structure for it, usually in or near the city center. It'll say "marché" or "les halles" on it, once you know what to look for they're easy to spot. The market is normally a couple times a week, early morning hours, in some places it will be over by 9, but in the summer vendors will be leaving even before that. Very small towns will just do it in the central square in front of the city hall or prominent church. Big cities will have one huge covered market somewhere that runs daily, and then smaller ones spread around different squares on other days.

Again idk about paris. Lived in france for many years and still back regularly for family. But spent maybe a week total in paris, and even that was over a decade ago.

There are many markets in Paris, they're open one day a week and most of them are over by 1 pm.

I was just in Paris. One of my favorite French cafes got replaced with a Popeyes. :/

My fat american butt eventually relented a few days later and I bought a single breast from them. It wasn't even good Popeyes. Tasted like either they dont know how to make a good crispy piece of chicken or Europe gets sent the scraps.

I was pretty blown away by all the Popeyes! Ironically I saw a group of Popeyes white collar employees in Popeyes swag on my flight to France. Strange, I thought. Why are they flying to France? Lo and behold, “Louisiana fried chicken” was everywhere. Is it because Louisiana has French history?

Its probably them requiring continuing growth and the US is tapped out.

Five Guys also showed up, their pistachio shake was intriguing but a huge disappointment.

I don't like what Paris has become, multiple French bistros have dropped in quality post-COVID(in my opinion).

Also seems like Costa coffee has abandoned the city? Their coffee wasn't anything to go crazy over but it had good memories when I was a broke unemployed dev touring Europe via backpack.

Maybe you were away long enough to realise the taste isn't good.

Popeyes? Seriously? Popeyes is da bomb.

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