Strangely, yellow delicious stays good despite getting softer. It doesn't get mealy, just softer, and it's still great to eat.
Wait, you mean it's possible for them to not be mealy?
> But as genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh.
You can also just plant the seeds and let them grow naturally, but it takes a lot longer to get any kind of results (not to mention more space).
I'm just getting started on this process at my farm actually (apples, pears, asian pears, and cherries so far, seedlings are growing, but I haven't grafted scions yet). It's a major exercise in long-term record keeping.
Here's an example of a tree with a lot of varieties grafted to it, though this guy isn't doing it for breeding purposes: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2437247/250-varietie...
Here's a wikipedia article that mentions the grafting process for testing new hybrids: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grafting
But I wouldn't call it a taste, it's texture: "how it feels in the mouth".
Although this state goes hand in hand with a stale taste.
I don't buy them anymore. When I buy apples (which is rarely), I usually get either Jonagold (cheap and good enough), or Gala or Braeburn when I want something better.
Perhaps the reason why we don't like Red delicious is the 'paradox of choice'. 40 years ago, there were perhaps 4 varieties of apples on average in a grocery store, today perhaps 9 or 10. Perhaps with the sweeter, crispier apples brought by advances in Agri-tech the Red Delicious has become lackluster in comparison.
40 years ago you would, I expect, find a larger variety of apples, most of them heirloom (ie. open pollinated, with a history you could trace back several hundred years, and were free to propagate at home) at the 'average grocery store'.
Now you'll typically find a selection of apple varieties that were bred relatively recently, selected for shipping and long storage life (ie. ability to retain colour, sweetness (not necessarily flavour), resistance to bruising, consistent colour and shape, russets are eschewed as they're not currently popular, etc).
To the east of London, UK, there's a (somewhat) government-run farm at Faversham, where they are maintaining a mighty collection of apples - somewhere around 2,500 distinct varieties. They also maintain around 700 cherry, and 500 pears, amongst other fruits ... many of which they can trace back several hundred years.
Complaining about just one apple variety seems to be totally missing the point - you can most certainly find, with some small effort, an apple that perfectly suits your idea of the perfect specimen.
Nowadays, even at my crappy Food Lion, I can find those three, plus usually 2-3 additional. At local higher end groceries, I can find 8-10.
At my local farmers' market, I can find 20-30 (when they're in season).
My personal favorites are Honeycrisp, Jonagold, and Pink Lady, but since Jonagolds aren't common in my state and Honeycrisps are a restricted patent and very expensive, we usually buy gala, fuji, and sometimes braeburn.
[I notice that Fuji apples are a R.D. cross from the 1930s... But Fuji are vastly tastier (and more attractive!)...]
Noting the 1980s as when it all started to go down hill: "But as genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh."
They're all propagated from cuttings, hence they are genetically identical. Which means the skins are the same as they were before, and the flesh as is bitter (or otherwise) as it was before, etc.
If they weren't, they wouldn't be called the same name, as evinced by many other 'modern' varieties, that are crosses or hybrids of (other) known apple varieties.
No, it actually doesn't mean that. First, genetics aren't the only determinants of those features; environmental factors, growing, shipping, and storage conditions, etc., all play a role.
Second, propagation by cutting doesn't mean they are genetically identical, because mutations still occur and are an important source of variability, and not all of them result in different branding.