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Comment by mjamesaustin | Hacker News Reader

This is the same story for every new variety of apple. It becomes popular because of its positive characteristics (sweetness, tanginess, juicyness, crispness), but then slowly over time it gets cultivated for mass market appeal (uniform color, shape, shelf life) and the variety loses what made it good.

The best apple variety is generally the new one. The market is strewn with the discarded remains of formerly good apples like Fuji and Gala.

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My preferred apple is Mutsu, available from a few growers in the late season at my southern Ontario farmers market. According to Wikipedia it's been around since 1949, but perhaps it simply never got popular enough to face these pressures— either way, I find it consistently to be in the right place for me as far as a balance of sweet, tangy, and crispy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutsu_(apple)

Any idea where those could be located on the us side of the border in Detroit?

Farmer’s market. Grocery store that isn’t a big chain. They’re here.

Given that it's a Japanese cultivar, I assume they're all over the place, you just have find a market where someone growing them has them for sale.

Aka “crispin” if that helps. Every apple farmer around here in NW NJ grows them, never seen them in a store. Also my favorite.

+1 here -- Mutsu are fantastic, readily available at NYC greenmarkets in the fall and into the winter, though there are pretty large differences in flavor and texture between various orchards too. Samascot is my fav.

Or the old one, find a local orchard that sells heirloom apples! Get some Cox's Orange Pippin or some Northern Spy or some Ashmead's Kernel.

I second the cox's. This harvest I bought several of each variety in the shop and cox's was my favorite by a mile.

Same here.

I can imagine growers don’t like them as much though, despite the lack of patents and trademarks. In Europe they were abundant and amazing quality last year, lasting into February. This harvest their flavour wasn’t there, many were mealy, and they were unavailable within a month. Their worst year as far as I can remember.

Be on the lookout for Esopus Spitzenburg (maybe only in the US). It's a really tasty apple.

Cox is a very good apple that is infamously prone to pick every apple disease known. Golden Delicious has the same problem, good flavor, disappointing as tree without using chemicals.

Rubinette is a medium sized yellow apple, streaked in reddish brown. Not particularly eye-catching and also prone to fungal diseases. But Rubinette has a secret, is a seedling of Cox x Golden delicious, and its flavor is fantastic.

Modern apples with not so sophisticated flavor but better resistance can be much more satisfactory.

I found the Westfield Seek-No-Further [1] this year and it's become my new favorite.

[1] https://www.scottfarmvermont.com/westfield-seeknofurther

Cox's Orange Pippin is a good baking apple, as well. Holds its shape, and goes all custardy, rather than dissolving into mush.

It's not as good as a Bramley. Does anyone in the US grow those commercially? Why not?

This is a thing I love about living in WA, I get the apples a few years before everyone else. Lets me send them to friends across the US before they hit their supermarkets.

And yes really the interesting thing is they're different and new. Tho I do really like cosmics. Especially if you dry them in a food dehydrator and then powder them into whipped cream.

Same deal with cherries.

Same with Western NY - proximity to Cornell’s apple research and lots of orchards is really great. If you’re an apple fanatic WA and WNY are the places to be.

I wonder what the incentives are that make mass market qualities more attractive to growers than what consumers want. Like, I can imagine a sorta-demand curve with "sweetness etc" to "uniform color etc" along the x axis and "clearing price" or something on the y axis, and I really wonder if the most efficient price is really so far to the mass market appeal side of the curve. Or to put it another way, why can't they just grow things people want?

What people want when you sit them down and have them try apples side by side is different from what they want when they are in a supermarket, tired from working all day, and starring out at a sea of apples and not quite remembering which one it was they liked.

The clearing price probably actually rises with improved color and shape, and the overhead declines with greater shelf stability. It’s not until years later that consumers slowly realize the texture and taste have gone downhill (as result of these developments) that clearing price begins to decline. So the market has a lag in response; it resembles a high value brand being sucked dry.

What people want, judging by their market behavior, is reliability. A lot of the best-tasting apples are inconsistent in quality, ship or store poorly, or have a short growing season. I love eating fresh heirloom apples, but Honeycrisps are 10% great, 80% good, and 10% disappointing, which I prefer to 30% good, 30% disappointing, and 40% unavailable.

The idea of a year-round fruit crop is a modern supermarket creation. Most food is seasonal. If a consumer are unaware of its seasonality, that’s because someone is working hard to hide that fact.

I try to enjoy asparagus when it is in season, new potatoes when they are in season, etc. Just because some crops are bred for months and months of storage doesn’t mean they actually taste great.

Out season asparagus is coming on a truck from a region with a different season or plane from South America, not from a shelf.

No, of course it is not from cold storage; instead the produce is flying around the world so that you can have them whenever you want.

Cold storage, jets, and long-haul trucking are particularly bad for some types of produce, not so bad for others.

Anyway, I’m not fighting the modern world, I like having tomatoes in January. But this article and discussion is about how you can have good apples, or you can have year-round apples at scale, but you can’t have both. And a lot of that comes down to the supermarket training consumers to expect the same produce every week.

Enshitification. I’ve been buying honeycrisp for a while and noticed more mushiness and flat flavor recently but I didn’t realize there was a whole apple-buying meta to keep up with if you don’t want to buy garbage fruit.

Edit: All the honeycrisp in my area right now are oversized. I’m guessing because of a supplier change due to the season change?

Oversized and without flavor? Watson, I think that we have another case of assassination by Giberellins here.

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