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Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

newengland.com

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Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#41

Post by WalterBright »

axaxs wrote: post #17
smhost wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's crazy. I always subconsciously assumed that Red Delicious apples were how apples have always been (because they taste/look so much less appetizing than the other ones, therefore they must be the most "natural"), and that those other apples were genetically modified. And, being an immigrant, I thought it might even be a cultural difference, and that Americans just prefer the taste of Red Delicious. This is blowin…

IIRC, most apples aren't genetically modified as we use the term today, just 'hybridized'/crossbred or whatever the word is. I think they're also all sterile.

I've been throwing the cores out into the wild parts of the lawn for 20 years. None have germinated.

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#43

Post by axguscbklp »

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?

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#45

Post by smegger001 »

koyote wrote: post #24

I think it's quite interesting that it's taken so long for a lackluster tasting food to decline in popularity. 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: At first I thought I might have chosen a bad batch, but after a couple of more buys I realised that these apples looked 'perfect' but always ta…

Its not just the perfect look that Red Delicious was bred for but shelf life. Those things take forever to rot compared to other apples and hide bruising, but they end up with dry mealy texture and very thick waxy skin. They were optimized for apple sellers not apple eaters.

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#46

Post by SEJeff »

wwweston wrote: post #15
koolba wrote: post #2

> “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. This is also why so many cultivars of tomato and cucumber taste like moist cardboard. Once you taste what the…

What's a good cucumber alternative and how do I get a hold of it?

https://www.rareseeds.com/store/vegetables/cucumbers Bakers Creek only sells heirloom seeds (no cultivars). I get most of my garden seeds from them as they have the lineage of the seeds they sell available.

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#47

Post by smegger001 »

fouc wrote: post #44

Damn breeders.. ruining apples and dogs over time. Always going for some aesthetic ideal over performance.

oh they bred for performance just with different metric than the consumer would prefer. they can sit on a shelf without rotting far longer than say a gala jazz or opal apple, they hide bruising, all great traits if you are a supermarket chain storing hundreds of thousands in a warehouse for months at a time waiting to send them out to stores over the course of a year between harvests.

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#48

Post by Eric_WVGG »

koolba wrote: post #2

> “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. This is also why so many cultivars of tomato and cucumber taste like moist cardboard. Once you taste what the…

Nearly nobody under the age of 35 is aware that popcorn used to taste like corn. Not like modern ears of corn, which are bred mostly for sweetness; more like tortilla chips, whose corn is still (somehow) cultivated for corn flavor. Corny.

[edit] … also I’m baffled by how, every time I “hold the tomatoes” on my burger or salad, someone will invariably say “don’t you like tomatoes?” and I have to go on this dumb rant about how the flavor has been bred out.

Like, all these people have had marinara sauce and even ketchup, which are made from varieties of tomatoes that are still cultivated for flavor (and thus unsuitable for long-distance shipping). They know what tomatoes actually taste like!! yet still eat these slices of pink tomato that somehow have less flavor than American cucumbers and think “this is the same thing”

Re: Red delicious apples weren’t always horrible

#50

Post by sliken »

koolba wrote: post #2

> “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. This is also why so many cultivars of tomato and cucumber taste like moist cardboard. Once you taste what the…

This is also why many AKC pure bred dogs have serious health problems. Turns of you select only on a simple metric like hair color, ear shape, of slope of the back, that you end up selecting for things that go against the very heart of what the breed was. So you lose characteristics that led to the breed in the first place.
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