From the article:
Due to the demands of industrial farming, only a handful of apple varieties make it to stores, and even of those, only the most uniform specimens sit on the shelves. Growers have abandoned many delicious or beautiful varieties that have delicate skin, lower-yield trees, or greater susceptibility to disease.
Then there's the wholesale destruction of old and disease free orchards which has seen the availability of once popular cultivars vanish. It's a crime really.
All of these are very valid reasons to not try to mass produce them. Even if they would be available from some person's orchard, they would still not be available in the shops or markets.
The two or three favourite varieties in the seventies and eighties have all disappeared. Not because customers no longer like them, but because the supermarkets wanted high yield, large size, taste free apples. More profit, and vast suppliers who'd supply a trillion tonnes at a time.
In the space of a decade the entire stock of trees for the UK's number one and two were grubbed up. The customers still wanted them, still asked for them, the supermarket response was "fuck you".
Now it's all Royal Gala, Golden Revolting^W Delicious, Pink Lady, Braeburn. All bland balls of taste free sugar.
The proper term is "Yellowish Horrible". A completely pointless apple.
Not sure if they do it in the UK, but Tesco, of all places, sometimes sells nice local apples when they're in season in Ireland.
There was no other place people could have purchased them?
Strawberries are noticeably different even at the grocery stores in the summer in New England.
It's really remarkable how canalized apple markets have become, when you're exposed to alternatives. The fads become somewhat self perpetuating because they shift context of perception (people judge based on what they know).
It's not so much currently popular apples are bad, just that there's lots more out there.
With apples too you have the interesting case of the cider market, hard and soft. You can kind of get a sense of the effects of fads because cider apples can be really different in appearance but otherwise meet other marketability criteria. You end up with different sets of apples, which speaks to what people like when appearance isn't an issue.
I acknowledge texture is an issue in eating vs drinking, and that cider apples are blended for their charactistics, but many are also varieties that used to be popular eating or cooking apples that drifted in popularity but are still used in cideries because they've stood the test of time and customers like the flavor.
Of corse where I live is pretty much apple orchard central. My neighbor has an orchard and “Johnny Appleseed” was from the next town over.
True. Local stores are nearly non-existent in Sweden. Even the smallest ones belong to a supermarket chain.
Where are the rest of Apple varieties? No one knows.
Well, some people do [1] Profits, economics, transportation.
[1] https://pitjournal.unc.edu/article/where-have-all-apples-gon...