I was with you until the second paragraph. Aren’t we having a kind of apple renaissance right now? Admittedly I know very little about apples, but when I was a kid the supermarkets basically just had red delicious and Granny Smith. Then came the galas & fujis and now my local supermarket has like 5 or 6 types of red apple, all of which are way better than anything I ate growing up (honey crisp are my current favorites).

Red Delicious, the worst apple in the world, is finally on the way out. For decades people have bought it because they were used to it or that's what was available. Truly terrible, with thick skin and a bitter, mealy interior.

My team's admin used to buy apples for us, including some Red Delicious. I explained that they were terrible so she stopped. It was easy to find supporting evidence in the form of 5 articles with titles like "Red Delicious is the worst apple in the world." No reason to buy them, except that they look pretty.

Recently there have been lots of new varieties, mostly distinguished by their good flavor and texture. Honey Crisp, as you mentioned, is one example. Cosmic Crisp is another: first available in 2019?, developed and grown in Washington state. Not sure if it's available in other states yet.

Red Delicious was actually a great apple when it was introduced. Read up on it the history of how this changed is interesting and kind of sad. The problem wasn’t the fruit, the issue was people could slowly change it while keeping the name.

As consumers began to purchase more of their food from large supermarkets, the apple's popularity encouraged commercial growers to increasingly select for longer storage and cosmetic appeal rather than flavor and palatability, which resulted in a less palatable fruit.[8][9][2] In particular the selection of redder fruit caused deselection of flavor, and the genes that produced the yellow stripes on the original fruit were on the same chromosomes as those for the flavor-producing compounds.[2] Breeding for uniformity and storability favored a thicker skin.[2] Later, as other cultivars entered supermarkets, demand for the 'Red Delicious' declined.[9][10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Delicious

I think this process is now underway on honeycrisps. Lately they seem to have thicker skins and less crispness than in the early days.

I'm not sure if that's necessarily a trend. There can be good batches and bad batches, since these varieties are sourced from many different growers. It's even possible to have a good year and a bad year, due to weather. In wine, people talk about good vintages and bad ones, so the same can exist in other fruit.

The first time I tried Honeycrisps, I didn't like them and avoided them for years. Then I tried again and got much better ones.

I first bought Cosmic Crisp in a local grocery store, and they were great. Then I bought them directly form an orchard in the part of the state where they are grown (about 100 miles from here), and they were totally bland and thoroughly unimpressive. Now I'm back to buying them in grocery stores, and those are fine.

Very interesting. I have some pretty strong habits (in addition to the obvious stuff like firmness) in picking veggies and fruit, like narrow cucumbers and small tomatoes. When I buy Apples I look for strong stripes. Mostly honey crisp and royal gala though, don't like *delicious.

Partly the governments fault. Color is part of the USDA’s grading criteria. Flavor is not part of the criteria.

Is that really the government’s fault? You can’t quantify flavor, people like the color red.

> You can’t quantify flavor

You can quantify things like sweetness or even presence of certain aromatics. If the technology to do this was tricky 80 years ago, it's much less so now.

Whether that would be helpful or not, I don't know. In part because...

> people like the color red.

It's actually an example of HN favorite Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

You can't taste an apple before buying it, usually. And certainly not the specific particular apple you are picking. So people have to pick based on qualities like visual appearance or firmness (or in some cases smell, but that's less helpful with apples than with some other fruits). A nice bright red apple was at some point, at least with some varieties, taken as a good proxy for good flavor/soundness.

Until growers, to take advantage of that, started breeding for color at the expense of flavor. Goodhart's Law.

People like an apple that is not rotten or diseased and tastes good, they were choosing red color at the market hoping it would represent that when you can't cut open an apple before buying it. I don't think most apple consumers actually prioritize color over taste.

Great post, I didn’t know about goodhart’s law. I see that a lot with standardization tests.

>I don't think most apple consumers actually prioritize color over taste.

It’s why those free samples are so great. I think they’re very effective at selling the brands and tastes.

Probably depends on where you shop and live. My parents live a few states over. Their local grocery will sometimes devote 2-3 whole rows (back/front) to different apple varieties (like 6+ varieties, I think). Local to me, we get green/red and sometimes other varieties in specialty grocery stores.

It depends on where you live. If you are in a place where this is true, then enjoy the bounty and count your blessings.

Not just Apples and veggies - check out Jimmy Red corn. It used to be a favorite of bootleggers, making illicit corn whiskey (aka moonshine), but was nearly lost. It's now available for sale again, both as seed corn and as a whiskey.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/01/02/574367086/fr...

> People spent their entire lives sometimes creating delicious varieties only to be blown out by produce that was cheap to grow and looked good on the supermarket shelf (taste didn’t matter).

Why would taste not matter? Surely people take into account taste when purchasing food. But they also decide to make tradeoffs in how much extra money to spend for the additional rate versus other things they could try with the additional money.

But given two foods at the same price and nutritional qualities, surely taste is a prominent factor.

It's a pretty widely studied artifact of mass retail that appearance was valued over taste, because appearance is immediately obvious while taste must be remembered and most consumers don't. In other words, it's immediately obvious what produce looks good, while knowing what produce tastes good requires time and attention. Most people don't really remember the difference between varieties of apples, for example, which are currently undergoing a bit of a renaissance as breeders have discovered the value of branding and marketing campaigns similar to those used for manufactured goods. The general perception is that this trend is starting to go away only now, as a largely internet driven food culture has emerged that values unusual varieties.

Moreover, for the retailer themselves, durability and shelf life is perhaps the single most important property in today's long supply chains, because produce is subject to rough handling and consumers absolutely do not purchase bruised fruit or wilted greens. Unfortunately it often runs opposite to other metrics of quality for produce.

> because appearance is immediately obvious while taste must be remembered and most consumers don't.

I find this hard to believe. Foods and taste is one of the most common experiences people have and converse about. Your last paragraph is just supporting that people might not be willing or able to spend the extra money for the tastiest fruits and vegetables.

Taste doesn’t matter in the majority of the fruit and vegetable market because it is not perceivable at the time of purchase.

Unless people are generally more forgetful than me, they can probably remember that the red delicious or gala apple they bought last week tastes worse than a honey crisp or cosmic crisp or whatever.

People might be choosing less tasty fruits and vegetables because they are cheaper, but they are not ignoring tastier ones because they do not care about taste.

A huge amount of the marketplace just thinks "apple" and doesn't note the variety.

A lot of us pay attention now, but did my mom pay so much attention to varietal when shopping? I don't think so.

I thought I hated apples growing up. The only thing my mom bought was a red delicious. Later in life I tried a honeycrisp and wow! Turns out I actually love apples.

There is no choice they simply aren’t available because they don’t transport or store well

Right, so it is too expensive to have those fruits flown in, not that people care about looks over taste.

Little known fact but mass-agriculture varieties of fruits and vegetables often have far less nutrition than heirloom varieties.

This is a myth. They usually taste worse, because they've been bred to grow to a uniform size, to be pretty, and to have a long shelf-life.

As far as nutrition is concerned, it only seems this way because they're pumped full of water and end up tasting just like bags of mildly tomato flavoured water.

If you take a heirloom variety and a mass-produced hybrid variety and grow them in the same good soil in full sun, their nutritional value should be about the same.

it should be, but it is not the way it works. The same happens with the tomato.

Homegrown tomatoes and tomatoes from the supermarket are two totally different fruits. They don’t even taste the same.

Same goes with strawberries and probably a lot of things.

I tasted heirloom tomatoes and they weren’t special

In the Bay Area, what you have said in the second sentence is thankfully not the case at all. A few varieties that I have tasted in the Bay Area (most of them quite regularly):

1. Red Delicious 2. Gala 3. Fuji 4. Pippin 5. Macintosh 6. Granny Smith 7. Golden Yellow 8. Mutsu 9. Pink Lady 10. Arkansas Black 11. Jonagold 12. Golden Ambrosia 13. Honeycrisp 14. Braeburn 15. Empire 16. Enterprise