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Comment by ranger207 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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 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.

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