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Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

275 点作者 kareemm将近 4 年前

39 条评论

koolba将近 4 年前
&gt; “It turns out that a lot of the genes that coded for the flavor-producing compounds were on the same chromosomes as the genes for the yellow striped skin,” Traverso explains, “so as you favored the more consistently colored apples, you were essentially disfavoring the same genes that coded for great flavor.<p>This is also why so many cultivars of tomato and cucumber taste like moist cardboard. Once you taste what they’re actually supposed to taste like, you’ll never be able to go back to a shrink-wrapped English cucumber grown in a hot house.
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mcv将近 4 年前
As a kid, I was a fan of Golden Delicious, while others criticised it for being too mealy. That wasn&#x27;t my experience, at least at first. Eventually I encountered increasingly mealy Golden &quot;Delicious&quot;, and started favouring other apples. Even the cheapest apples here, like Elstar and Jonagold, are pretty good in comparison.<p>I wonder if it&#x27;s the fate of any breed to eventually be bred for looks instead of taste. If you see two apples (or any other fruit or vegetable) of the same name, aren&#x27;t you more likely to pick the tastier <i>looking</i> one? You can&#x27;t taste them in the shop, but you can compare by looks. So eventually, that&#x27;s what they end up being bred for.<p>I&#x27;d expect the only way to protect an apple from that fate, would be to trademark the name, and the rightsholder only licenses the name to apples from cultivars that breed for taste and don&#x27;t sacrifice taste for looks.<p>This might be a case where IP rights might be used for good.
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koyote将近 4 年前
I think it&#x27;s quite interesting that it&#x27;s taken so long for a lackluster tasting food to decline in popularity.<p>When I moved to the US from Western Europe, the relative difference in food quality was quite apparent and I distinctly remember noticing this first with the apples:<p>At first I thought I might have chosen a bad batch, but after a couple of more buys I realised that these apples looked &#x27;perfect&#x27; but always tasted foamy. I assumed what the article confirms: the apples were chosen for their looks and not their taste.<p>What I think is weird about that mentality is that surely after the initial buy &quot;oh these look declicious!&quot;, the consumer will try them and think &quot;oh these don&#x27;t taste good. I won&#x27;t buy them again&quot;. Maybe it&#x27;s just habit and it&#x27;s taken a while for people to change that habit, especially if you never try anything different to compare it with.<p>I know a lot of Americans that do not like apples because all they&#x27;ve ever had were the foamy ones.
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ggm将近 4 年前
Apples, like Tomato are textbook examples of what mechanised volume production and warehousing does to &quot;tasty&quot;. You can either have cheap food, or you can have good food, but good cheap food (where good means nutritious, delicious) is a lot harder and Cheap generally beats out good anyway, for most people.<p>Remember in context, we probably waste over 30% of the produce along the supply chain, seeking absolutely &quot;perfect&quot; blemish free apples in a tray, wrapped in plastic, cheaper than before.<p>Down here in Oz people have moved on from &quot;organic is better for you&quot; (debatable) to &quot;I like it better&quot; which being couched in the preference space, is less contestable. I do like things which taste bettter, and I am prepared to pay the premium to get them.<p>I would be interested if the same process which took red delicious to stable, thick skinned, resilient also reduced nutritive value, we read increasingly that abundant food production often includes reducing actual food value (vitamins, minerals, antioxidents, flavones), in favour of mass production but I don&#x27;t know how true it is.
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igammarays将近 4 年前
You probably don&#x27;t even know what real vegetables taste like. As a Canadian born and raised who moved to Ukraine a few years ago, one of the most surprising things I encountered was how <i>tasty</i> a simple salad can be. Then I found out that mineral levels in vegetables in North America are estimated to have dropped 90% since 1914 [1]. Ukrainians who migrate to other countries are often heard to complain about a loss in food taste - and I know exactly what they&#x27;re talking about because I&#x27;m a foreigner who noticed the difference in food taste right away.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20965771" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20965771</a><p>My old comment on the matter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20969214" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=20969214</a>
jbluepolarbear将近 4 年前
There are Apple orchards that were abandoned in Washington State that my dad use to to take us to. These orchards had only red delicious and they were the best apples I’ve had. There are a lot of abandoned orchards around Washington and old species keep getting found.
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tipoftheiceberg将近 4 年前
Please support your local orchards if possible!<p>The apples you find in stores don’t even compare to some of the unique cultivars you can find at many orchards
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jhgb将近 4 年前
Does this apply only to the US-grown apples, or is this a global problem?<p>&gt; When you picture an apple, you probably picture a Red Delicious<p>Actually, I picture a Granny Smith. ;)
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ithinkso将近 4 年前
Reinette were always my favorite apples, sort of popular in Poland but nor very &#x27;presentable&#x27; [1]. Still, the best imho<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pl.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reneta#&#x2F;media&#x2F;Plik:Egremont_Russet_Apple.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pl.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Reneta#&#x2F;media&#x2F;Plik:Egremont_Ru...</a>
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jefftk将近 4 年前
Since apples are propagated by grafting (cloning), has anyone kept original (&quot;heirloom&quot;?) Red Delicious stock from before it was optimized for looks? I&#x27;d be very curious to try one!
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mtnGoat将近 4 年前
I live in the &quot;Apple Capital of the World&quot;, had to learn about apples my whole life. I&#x27;m not sure its a fair to make blanket statements about red delicious apples as many are not cloned&#x2F;grafted, so the taste varies from producer to producer. The big name varieties of apples now are all copyright&#x2F;trademark and grown via grafting, making output control much easier. Many of the older red del orchards are old and no longer profitable due to modern day orchard planting and management being much more advanced. As those orchards get replaced they get replanted or grafts from a currently more profitable variety are put into them. A reasonable amount of new varieties are growing on stumps&#x2F;roots that once produced red delicious fruits.<p>Rave and Ambrosia are the two variants Stemilt is pushing hard these days.<p>the average now is around 12 years before they switch the varieties and put new grafts on a stump. seven years to get back to full production size, 5 years of product and then switch. the apple varieties being marketed today have been in the works for near a decade or more.
matttproud将近 4 年前
Growing up in North America by the time I became an adult, I had written off apples in entirety for being dull balls of coagulated sand consistency material. It was lost on me why anyone would ever voluntarily eat one. It didn’t matter whether mass market or where.<p>Fast forward in life: two years after moving to Switzerland, I found myself hungry and desperate while on the road, expecting the worst. I ate one of the domestic varieties grown in Thurgau (der Apfelkanton or apple mecca). Absolutely blown away by the freshness and flavor profile.<p>My takeaway is whatever is calling whatever is sold in the US as an Apple is a crime. A similar thing happened to me here with milk (it didn’t have a lingering bleach or watered down aroma) and using buses for transit. I think North America scarred me.
mastazi将近 4 年前
I was lucky that I could grow up in a family where we produced most of the food we ate[1]. The main thing I learned, is that the interests of food consumers and food producers are, and always will be, misaligned, unless you are the one producing the food you eat.<p>When I was a kid, I used to despise supermarket food (I later learned to eat it out of necessity, once I moved out of my parent&#x27;s place).<p>Now I&#x27;m saving up so I can buy a homestead when I retire, and my dream is to produce food for me and my loved ones.<p>[1] I grew up on a small farm and homestead in Italy, my grandparents and parents had a few money crops (olive oil, wine, eggs) and everything else on the farm was for our own consumption (veggie garden, orchard, meat chickens, pigs, rabbits etc.).
ljm将近 4 年前
I haven&#x27;t seen red delicious on sale in UK supermarkets for ages. I used to back in my childhood, when you had a variety of loose apples on sale. We bought red delicious and golden delicious because they were cheaper, and we got granny smith apples as a treat. I liked red more than golden for reasons I don&#x27;t remember but I think red had a stronger crunch and a thicker skin.<p>I really don&#x27;t like over-sweet fruit and it feels like a lot of fruits have been engineered for extra sweetness. So these days I try and stick to boring&#x2F;milder stuff like Braeburn or Gala. Even for other fruits, like strawberries, it&#x27;s hard to find a punnet that isn&#x27;t the &#x27;supersweet&#x27; variety.
irrational将近 4 年前
Good article, but the author’s conclusion is flawed. Pink Lady is the best eating apple ;-)<p>(Before anyone brings up Honeycrisp - I do think it is the best saucing apple.)
mark-r将近 4 年前
The Red Delicious stands out to me as the textbook example of the power of naming and marketing. The origin story is unbeatable. The power of a name on our perceptions is undeniable. Realizing all of this has been one of the most empowering discoveries of my adult life.
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dmitryminkovsky将近 4 年前
This is a great account if you’re interested in fruit cultivars: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;pomological" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;pomological</a>
barathr将近 4 年前
I&#x27;d encourage everyone to check out California Rare Fruit Growers generally, and specifically this list of apples from a tasting a couple years ago:<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mbcrfg.org&#x2F;apple-tasting-2019-rankings&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;mbcrfg.org&#x2F;apple-tasting-2019-rankings&#x2F;</a>
nostrademons将近 4 年前
Red Delicious was my favorite apple as a kid. Some of this might be questionable taste - my sister&#x27;s favorite was a Mcintosh - but I wonder if they were better 40 years ago. Had one recently and it was underwhelming. My wife turned me on to Pink Ladies and Fujis and I&#x27;ll never go back to Delicious.
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dotcommand将近 4 年前
That explains why red apples taste horrible but what happened to grapes? I remember when grapes were the dark bluish&#x2F;blackish concord types and now, the supermarkets mostly carry green and purple grapes which taste awful in comparison.
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WalterBright将近 4 年前
I thought it was just me that hated the Red Delicious. The Fujis and Granny Smiths seem to be going downhill fast.<p>The Galas are ok.<p>I planted my own apple tree 20 years ago. Some years I get some fruit that the deer missed, and those are awesome.
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axguscbklp将近 4 年前
I agree that supermarket fruits and vegetables often seem to lack in flavor but to my taste, Red Delicious is not worse than any other supermarket apple. All supermarket apples, even the sour ones, pretty much just taste like slightly different variants of sugar water to me - the sourness of the sour apples just rides on top of the sugar water taste without really displacing it. I do not know why Red Delicious specifically has been singled out as the target of multiple critical articles given that one could just as accurately write such articles about all sorts of produce. Do most people really think that other supermarket apples taste any better than Red Delicious?
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aVx1uyD5pYWW将近 4 年前
I find that red delicious actually tastes quite good if you manage to eat it before it becomes mealy. Sweet, juicy, crisp bite. The problem is just that they become mealy relatively quickly.
whynotkeithberg将近 4 年前
I was a massive fan of red delicious as a kid... I remember I continued buying them up until about 5-6 years ago because I always remembered the incredible taste but it never seemed to match up with my memories. I read a similar article 5-6 years ago and that&#x27;s when I finally stopped buying. Now I mostly buy Pink Lady or Honeycrisp. Although the new Cosmic Crisp apples are quite great too and they last forever in the fridge.
kieckerjan将近 4 年前
In a similar vein, I recently learned from Harold McGee&#x27;s superb new book Nose Dive that modern flowers (the ones you are likely to buy from a flower shop) tend to smell less than their predecessors. This is because plants use the same metabolic pathways to make colors and smells, and if you optimize these pathways for colors, as we nowadays do, the smells suffer.
aetherson将近 4 年前
Envy apples are good.
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jader201将近 4 年前
I used to love apples. Until I realized that most of the ones I would buy ended up being mealy. It was like rolling dice as to whether one would be mealy.<p>Maybe it’s because we started buying organic? We got some apples one time that weren’t organic, and they were great.<p>If organic apples are too susceptible to being mealy, I guess I’d rather just eat other organic fruits vs. eating non-organic apples.
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renewiltord将近 4 年前
No Apple compares to the Envy<p>Massive. Flavorful. Crisp.<p>Looks like it was made in a GMO factory. Tastes like heaven. Envy über Apples.
Angostura将近 4 年前
I remember when I first visited the U.S on a press trip back in the 90s thinking how odd it was that all the fresh fruit I offered looked so <i>good</i> and tasted of so little. It wasn&#x27;t just the red delicious apples, it was things like the strawberries too.
MisterBastahrd将近 4 年前
I had a real sweet tooth as a kid and learned early on that a bruised Red Delicious was a sweeter apple, so I would take some apples from my parents&#x27; kitchen and bruise them all over and let them rest for a day. The result was not only sweeter, but more flavorful too.
butterfi将近 4 年前
I just got back from Istanbul where the abundance of fresh beautiful produce made me want to slap the local Whole Foods vegetable buyer. I think we may have lost our way on how we buy and sell produce.
LorenPechtel将近 4 年前
This is why a lot of people grow produce at home. Seeds&#x2F;plants meant for home growing favor tasty over transportability and thus most garden produce is far superior to what the store sells.
fouc将近 4 年前
Damn breeders.. ruining apples and dogs over time. Always going for some aesthetic ideal over performance.
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swayvil将近 4 年前
I recommend the Pippin apple.
TazeTSchnitzel将近 4 年前
I assume this kind of disaster is why Pink Lady is a trademark.
gowan将近 4 年前
imo the granny smith is the all time worse apple. always taste like a green apple (not trying to be ironic) and usually has a thick skin. just plain terrible might as well pick any apple variety before it is ripe.<p>if you want a good green apple buy a newtown pippin.
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every将近 4 年前
Uh, winesap please...
legohead将近 4 年前
red delicious are great. for a while I was purposely buying different apples each week and checked my kid&#x27;s reactions. turns out they like gala and red delicious the most.
dgan将近 4 年前
I absolutely love apples, and those Red Delicious are quite delicious<p>No idea what the article is complaining about
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