The article seems oriented toward raw consumption, I like to experiment with food canning and I've made many single variety batches of applesauce to experiment with. Pure grannies are a little acidic to me. My kids like red delicious applesauce, for something thats basically sweet with a texture its not bad. Ida Red results in an extremely pale nearly white applesauce which is interesting looking but the taste is boring. I'd have to find my notes I've experimented with most every variety at one time or another. Its a fun relaxing hobby.
Something I like about home canning my own applesauce is bug-leg-free applesauce is commercially unavailable in stores, its safe to eat buggy applesauce but pretty gross once you have a source of bug-leg-free applesauce. Also if you follow the USDA/BallBook you can't vary lemon content for food safety reasons but you can vary cinnamon and its an eternal experiment to try different ratios. Also there are USDA approved low/no sugar applesauce recipes but in the store you can only buy corn syrup or artificial sweetener applesauce.
Anyway to make a long story short, store applesauce is gross, few hobbies are as delicious as home canning applesauce, and I've had "OK" results with red delicious in applesauce form. Its not pure red evil or whatever as the article claims.
Next story, lets debate Concord grapes, vs Flame seedless, in raw and home canned jelly form.
"Also there are USDA approved low/no sugar applesauce recipes but in the store you can only buy corn syrup or artificial sweetener applesauce."
I don't understand what you're saying here ... there are many, many national brands of applesauce that consist of just a single ingredient - apples. Santa Cruz is one, as is Cadia, as is the Whole Foods "365" brand ...
Its one of those single percentage anecdotes don't matter things. My boring regional employee owned chain supermarket does not sell unsweetened applesauce at all, nor do any of the other nearby supermarket chains.
I've heard of Whole Foods (aka Whole Paycheck) and was motivated to pull the stats. Some google work indicates Whole Foods gross sales revenue last year was $15B vs the US supermarket chain stores gross sales of $649B. Of course this doesn't count "superstore" concepts like walmarts and targets (and probably others) selling food, nor online or delivery groceries, independents, organic stores, etc etc. So "much more" than 98% of applesauce is not sold at Whole Foods. Assuming that all applesauce sold at whole paycheck is unsweetened, etc. Assuming goods distribution is similar, from my own experience at whole paycheck most people are buying specialty goods like alcohol, meat, produce not bulk processed goods although they do stock them.
We make apple sauce using our pressure cooker from the tart apples that grow in our area and freeze it instead of canning it. The taste is phenomenal, rendering store-bought inedible.
Growing up this is how we had apple sauce. It is so delicious and makes store bought totally unappealing. My mom made hers quite chunky making it ideally as a topping for homemade vanilla ice cream.
Core apples and cut into slices. Put in pressure cooker with some water, maybe 1/4 cup. Bring pressure cooker up to pressure and keep at pressure for 1 minute. Turn off stove and allow pressure to come down on its own. Voila!
We do not add any spices or sugar, but do so to taste if you wish.
And I should have mentioned that after the pressure comes down naturally, carefully open the pressure cooker and puree the apples with a stick blender.
I've made apple sauce a few times for near-immediate consumption (over the course of maybe a week). There is a big, notable difference in taste and quality from the store-bought. Might be time to try canning it for longer term consumption.
However, stores near here do carry a no sugar added bottle of applesauce. That's all we ever buy, and I can't imagine why they would even consider adding sugar/corn syrup. I like making it at home because I can play with the tartness a little more by adding in some grannies, and I like to leave in the skin for the added nutrients.
No need to can it, you can freeze them in ziplock bags with no loss of flavor or texture. My family makes a whole year's worth at once, though of course you need spare freeze space.
Studies show that sugar and salt increase consumption. So they add these things to increase sales. People aren't making a decision that's in their best interest, this is a biological hack that favors one party disproportionately compared to the other.
Sugar and salt make things taste better. Things that taste better also tend to sell better. If you took all salt and sugar out of food, you'd certainly eat and sell less, because it wouldn't taste good.
You can call it biohacking if you want, but it is no more so than when your mom made you dinner.
>The more salt you eat, the thirstier you get. Right? Wrong, according to two studies released today in The Journal of Clinical Investigation. The research found that as salt consumption increased, people actually drank less water. And the high-salt diets seemed to make study subjects hungrier, too.
Sugar and salt make things taste better. Things that taste better also tend to sell better. If you took all salt and sugar out of food, you'd certainly eat and sell less, because it wouldn't taste good.
This is quite subjective. Sugar and salt make things "taste better" if you already have a certain expectation that that's how food "should" taste. That's not the case if you don't have that expectation.
I gave up buying products using refined sugar entirely for an extended period, and baked all my own bread, oatcakes, biscuits etc. Food which I previously found unpalatable without adding sugar or syrup, I could now eat and find perfectly tasty. When I cook porridge in the morning, water and a touch of salt are all it needs. I think it recalibrated my taste significantly--if I now try to eat even a biscuit from a supermarket, all I can taste is the excessive amount of salt in it. Likewise anything with refined sugar--it's too much, and it tastes disgusting. I think with industrially-produced food, we've become so used to the excessive amount of salt and sugar, that it has become normal to expect it even when it's unnecessary and things taste bland when they aren't included--even though it's perfectly fine. You're likely right it sells better. But it's like the music "loudness war" but with ingredients; the end result isn't that enjoyable or good for you even though it seems superficially better.
You substituted salt for sugar in your morning cereal. Try it with neither, and no milk, which is actually quite sweet. If one drops refined sugar and adds fruit (e.g., raisins), it is still sugar (as far as flavor goes). There are very few foods that have no salt or sweetness (refined or natural sugar) that still taste good.
By conventional American palettes. There's great research done on flavor perception by culture, and the US specifically associates sweetness with intensity of flavor, whereas cultures that don't favor sugar so highly more often associate saltiness with heightened flavor.
One example of this is the use of salt or spices on fruit. The generic US palette considers the sweetness of fruit to be its purpose, but many cultures will spice, salt, or cook the same fruits the way vegetables are prepared in the US.
Small correction, but that study (and I believe there was only one) indicated that fructose metabolism produced less satiation than glucose, not that it actually prevents it. If you add fructose to a food and eat it, you'll still be more full than if you hadn't added fructose, just less full than if you had added glucose.
I think the reasoning was more like this: "Focus groups show that kids like their applesauce sweeter. What's a cheap sugar?"
> I can't imagine why they would even consider adding sugar/corn syrup
Just about any commercial fruit processing is going to need a plan for standardizing brix. That usually will involve some form of sugar. In theory you could have very stringent requirements of your suppliers, but that will get expensive, and even if brix is good, you may need to deal with abnormal acidity in a batch.
Simply Orange Juice seems to do it using "a computer-modeled blending of orange juice sources, intending for the consumer to have a uniform taste year-round"
I greatly enjoy canning with liquor and the classic brandied apple chunks is delicious. I also make a batch of peach rum sauce every year which tastes incredible.
I know the stuff is not good for me from a carb and alcohol standpoint but making it myself is an inherent limiter to consumption and if I'm going to eat junk food its going to be fantastic amazing junk food.
Pork chops taste good. Homemade canned brandied apples as a side dish to pork chops is delicious.
My grandmother always used to make applesauce with Winesaps. There's a little orchard around here that always kept a couple trees for her and they're still there. Every season we go and get some to make applesauce out of em. Always better than store-bought, plus I can't for the life of me find a store-bought chunky applesauce that doesn't have sweeteners and all that in it.
Honey Crisp Apples are the best tasting apples I have ever eaten but they cost almost triple the price. Pink Ladies are also phenomenal. My 6 and 10 year old like them better then candy.
Fuji are also good, but yeah, honeycrisp are definitely the tastiest apple I have ever eaten... I was brought up on galas and golden delicious and I had no idea that apples could taste as good as a honeycrisp does
The University of Michigan blundered by marketing the apple under the varietal name; varietals are considered inherently generic under trademark rules and so ineligible for protection.
A Pink Lady apple is actually a Cripps Pink, grown and picked in accordance with certain quality standards. Anyone can sell a Cripps Pink, but only licensees of Brandt's Fruit Trees Inc can sell a Pink Lady.
Anecdotally, UMN has one of the best agriculture research programs in the world, and it's entirely based around figuring out how to grow really anything when first frost is early September (Minnesota).
Unfortunately, though, a large percentage of Pink Ladies offered in stores around here (Germany) come from New Zealand... and that even though apples are among the fruit that grow well in Germany. I like Pink Ladies, especially for the texture, but I prefer to buy fruit that does not have to be shipped half way around the globe.
If they're shipping Pink Ladies from New Zealand, and there's an efficient market, can't we imply that it's a better allocation of resources to get Pink Ladies from New Zealand? I mean, they're probably cheaper _even though_ they're getting shipped halfway across the world. What the market is saying is that: the highly skilled population of Germany is probably better off doing more advanced things than growing apples.
I think that the reasoning against shipping apples across the globe is that consumers do not pay the full price; one might argue that the transportation is subsidised by our extraction and burning of oil at a rate much quicker than it is formed
Hmmm, I can get behind the idea that oil isn't priced appropriately given it's externalities, but I would've focused on CO2, with a carbon tax being the solution, rather than looking at the rate at which oil is reformed.
We are depleting oil reserves at about 5 million times the rate they formed.[1] Corollary: oil price reflects an off-books depletion factor of roughly 5 million-fold. The price is vastly too low.
Our fossil fuel consumption translated to present total biomass production (NPP, or the "photosynthetic ceiling"), is a very substantial fraction of all plant growth, I believe about 40%. We currently account for 20% of NPP consumption without utilising biomass as fuel.[1]
The history of why extractive natural resources are costed on a labour-required basis only (and some very questionable economic and legal theories support this) is an interesting accident of history, religion, law, geology, business, oil, and more. I've been digging into that, though have further to go. The short answer is that we'd started using the stuff long before we understood its creation, and by the time we understood we pretended not to care.[2]
The history of oil price response to overextraction in particular is mesmerising, with the booms at Titusville, Spindletop, and East Texas especially. The latter saw price per barrel fall from a $1 target, to $0.13, and then further to $0.02/bbl, before the national (and effectively global) production quota system managed by, of all organisations, the Texas Railroad Commission, was established in 1931. That lasted until 1972, after which you may be aware oil's price fluctuated somewhat.[3]
Similar issues exist for other strategic minerals, as first grasped during WWII, leading to the creation of the Harbord List, now the U.S. Strategic Mineral Reserve.[4]
(Oil is also subject to strategic reserves. You may be aware of an incident involving the U.S. Naval Strategic Petroleum Reserve a few years back, the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration.[5])
Until the early 20th century, only direct labour was considered as a cost of production.[6]
The energy required to ship an apple from New Zealand to California is significantly less than the energy needed to truck it from California to Colorado. Energy policy is strange and counter-intuitive.
I'm impugning your claim that the price of oil is too low.
I asked you to complete the information required to back up the claim and you rejoined with some aside about how there were multiple ways to interpret one of the words in my question.
Sure it does. If it becomes trivial to conjure the equivalent, then it doesn't matter if oil is gone.
My framing is sloppy (because I only talk about the future value of oil rather than the cost of obtaining the equivalent), but I think the point survives it, because the value of oil would drop to the cost of obtaining the equivalent.
Pretty high. It is a primary source of long-chain hydrocarbons, a primary feedstock for chemistry. Most biologically active chemicals produced by industry rely on oil as the chief starting material.
Though any carbon feedstock can address that. For a materials standpoint, there are substitutes.
Natural gas as feedstock to the Haber-Bosch process and coking coal in steel production, for reducing ore, are both much more formidable. They account for a large fraction the consumption of both (15% in the case of coal), and substitutes are difficult.
The story of where Earth's crustal iron comes from, when, and how, particularly as banded iron formations, is another interesting story.
You are probably paying that price no matter what - if you want apples out of season, you either have to keep them in a coolstore for months, or ship them from another part of the world where they are in season. It could be that buying local apples that are 6 months old has a higher impact than shipping them.
Apples don't really all have the same "season" - even though they have a time to be picked, more tart apples are meant to be stored in cool conditions, with the starches converting to sugars and the acidity dropping over time.
And if someone buys a child prostitute, is that the market saying that's the most efficient allocation of resources and the best way for the predator to outlive their dysfunctions? Insert a less polemic example if you want, same point; it's a total non-sequitur.
edit: if you can downvote, you can answer the question. I did my fair share of hard thinking about this, I come prepared, so until anyone has anything, this stands, and you'll either have to step up or live with that.
I know some cafes (and markets etc) near where I live have started pushing [food miles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles) as a bit of a differentiator (in a similar vein to being 100% organic; eg showing the food miles of goods, or guaranteeing that the food mileage is less than X, etc) which would be the kind of movement that aligns with your concern, if of interest.
As did I. In fact, because of how to felt about Red Delicious apples, I thought that I just didn't like apples until I was in my 30s and tried Granny Smith apples.
With the realization that I just hated Red Delicious apples, I tried a few other varieties. I really like Fuji apples too.
When a new variety is on sale, sometimes, I like to buy a bag and try them out.
The article mentioned that thicker skins on the apples make them less palatable when the interior is soggy/grainy textured.
Personally, I like thicker skins but only on Jazz apples, which are tart and sweet. Red delicious are inferior in that the thick skin indeed covers an undesirable mouthful of mush.
Jazz apples are the only apples I buy anymore. They're a bit hard, but they're also the only apple that I actually have to stop myself from eating too many of. It's a shame that they can be harder to find than Fujis and Honeycrisps, which I find a lot more boring (but still miles better than the Red Delicious), but I think they're becoming a bit more common over time.
They're not always available, but I've found that I like Envy apples almost as much as Honey Crisp. And when they show up in stores, Envy tends to be quire a bit cheaper.
Their availability might depend on location, though. I only see them in Toronto for 2-3 months every year.
Opal apples are incredible - tough to beat. But, they are also hard to find... I heard millions of new trees are being planted to keep up with demand... now I'm craving one just thinking about it.
I'm not an apple snob but if you have a chance (and live in the right temperature zone) visit a local orchard and pick some random varieties to try.
Here is Western Massachusetts you can get Cortland, Macoun, Empire, Mutsu, Spy, Spencer, Ida Reds, Paula Reds, Jersey Mac, Gravenstein, Redfree, Gingergold, Suncrisp, Rom Beauty, Jonagold and (probably) hundreds of other varieties. Some might be better for baking or cider but hey, maybe you'll like them to eat in-hand.
I feel like apples are an appropriate thing to be a little bit snobby about. There just really is a lot of difference between cultivars, and some of them are legitimately gross.
I think it would be one thing to be a snob to the extent of "I'll only eat this one cultivar from New Guinea which costs $30 apiece and must be ripened individually under a swan's left wing", but it's another to say "I only care for a few types of apple, and also screw the Red Delicious".
I feel like those of us from the Northeast or from Washington actually are apple snobs. It's just so easy to be one if you've ever actually lived close-enough to orchards that big picked bags and baskets became your main apple supply for the whole early fall.
I lived not too far from where Red Delicious was originally bred, and I can say from personal experience the original Red Delicious is not the Red Delicious that is typically sold in the grocery store.
Of course, I've never had the original one, but the heritage Red Delicious apples from multiple small orchards within a certain radius of where it was developed all taste totally unlike the ones in large groceries elsewhere in the US.
The ones from Iowa you would probably recognize as Red Delicious if you were told that, and if you were not told their identity you probably wouldn't. They're much smaller, rounder, more variegated in color, and have a much more complex flavor. Many people would probably guess McIntosh, but probably would say they have no idea.
My experiences have left me with the strong impression that some kind of subsequent genetic drift/inadvertent selection occurred, or that there's such a dominant set of horticulture protocols with the apple that the original characteristics of the apple have been washed out.
I don't think circumstances around your anecdote leave room for it to be factual. "Red delicious" isn't simply a breed of apple — they're all trademarked clones. The offspring of an apple tree won't produce anything like the fruit of the original apple. In fact, the overwhelming majority will be inedible and only suitable for cider. Genetic drift isn't really plausible because there's no mechanism by which these trees would drift genetically.
New apple strains are, as far as I know, not really bred for. They're found in the wild.
I may be wrong, but I'm pretty confident that an apple that isn't a strict clone of red delicious can't be marketed as a red delicious. It's also possible that growing conditions now have changed enough to alter the fruit, but I'm not positive that it would be a large enough difference to notice.
We had a bunch of apple trees when I was a kid, including a red delicious tree that was probably planted in the 1920s. Its apples were my favorite, especially when they became crisp and sweet after a light frost. Perhaps store bought red delicious suck but I think this hate is just misplaced elitism from people who've never had one off the tree.
That makes it even more important to point it out. Most people would otherwise have no clue there's anything to miss out on. As some people above said, making their own apple sauce made "store bought inedible". The flip side of that is, to make cheaply and badly mass produced things sell, people can't know good things. Once stuff is gone and purged from the archives, it's gone. The feelings of anyone who happens to be around currently, including ourselves, are not even a matter compared to the dangers of that.
We can't remain at the point where our problems with coping with emotions restrict our intellectual movements. This isn't asking anyone to run 50000 miles, or go a week without sleep or a year without food, it's just saying "this thing you think is good is actually kind of shit, and if you knew this actually good thing that would be immediately obvious to you, please don't die now". And while most people (including me) can't have a tree, everybody but the very poorest could save up some money to buy just one "real" apple to at least confirm this. Or maybe buy two, and give one to a poor person, just so they know how bad the apples they sometimes eat are. And then the question is "what does this mean, how can this be improved", etc., and not "how do I live with this blow to my ego". Please, don't take this as me being upset at your comment at all, it triggered me, you could say. I read Fahrenheit 451 recently and since then every HN discussion has aspects that remind me of it.
If people didn't personally identify so much with what they know and do etc., there wouldn't even be any hurt feelings to overcome, but I'm not even going there. Let's assume it's real offensive to be corrected or put down a peg: yes, and, so, what? That should motivate us to head off others at the pass, and to smoothly inspect their lessons and take them on board without blinking should they have merit, to become good at it, instead of attempting to ban it.
> internet folks trashing the preferences of 99 percent of the population
vs. article:
> His words contain the paradox of the Red Delicious: alluring yet undesirable, the most produced and arguably the least popular apple in the United States. It lurks in desolation. Bumped around the bottom of lunch bags as schoolchildren rummage for chips or shrink-wrapped Rice Krispies treats.
Maybe it's a bit rich coming from me after going on such tangents, but still, it takes some mental gymnastics to turn complaints about "ramming [these apples] down the throats of American consumers" into "being a snob for thinking lowly of people for liking these apples so much". No, everybody would be able to tell the huge difference, but as you said, most people don't get the chance. That's the problem, not the solution.
> Perhaps store bought red delicious suck but I think this hate is just misplaced elitism from people who've never had one off the tree.
I've had Red Delicious both directly off the tree and reasonably fresh from the farm, and they are, in either of those cases, generally far better than from the supermarket, true.
Even so, they aren't now as good as I remember them—even from the supermarket—from 30-35 years ago (they seem to be on average a lot more mealy now), and, even back then they were a middling variety for eating without preparation, and not particularly outstanding for any preparation I can think of.
It's not elitism - the problem is virtually nobody has access to the quality of apples you did. Generally speaking, we are limited to what is at the store, and they taste like shit.
Shouldn't think so, at least not of necessity. I lived next to a small apple orchard for a while as a kid, and in a tumbledown hovel with chipboard walls at that; the trees belonged to the same farmer who rented us the place, who certainly wasn't any more a member of any elite anywhere than we ourselves were.
Yeah, it was a real privilege for a kid and his single mom to be living well below the poverty line in a three-room shack that any half-awake inspector would've immediately condemned - not least for the black mold that ate up one whole wall of the third room so we had to seal it off with plastic - because it happened to sit on a hill next to a tiny patch of half-gone-to-seed apple trees that produced maybe as much as a half bushel in a season, the whole being owned by a former truck farmer whose income consisted in no inconsiderable part of the pitiful rent he got for the place, and who barely afforded the property taxes that left unpaid would've had the lot of us indigent.
I understand that the rhetoric of privilege isn't intended as personal attack, or at least that that's not its ostensible intent. I wish more people who favored it understood that, however intended, personal attack is the way it comes across, and that makes it unhelpful - indeed, actively harmful, if the purpose is to promote sympathy, among those not so predisposed, for those philosophies in whose service the rhetoric is invariably deployed.
The fact that your life sucked in many other ways is irrelevant. Having fresh fruit growing on plants near your house which you can eat is a privilege that most people do not have.
I'm not saying, "your life was privileged, and you suck." I'm saying, "your situation of having fresh-off-the-tree apples was an unusual privilege." Am I wrong, or do you just object to the one word, and want me to know a bunch of other things about how you lived too?
To reiterate from my prior comment, I understand exactly what you're saying. The problem I have is that you're not listening to what I'm saying - which, again, is that it doesn't matter what you're saying, because when you use this rhetoric to express it, you piss people off even if in spite of yourself, and the rhetoric is therefore actively inimical to the purpose in whose service you employ it.
It's not that complicated or controversial a point, or at least I wouldn't have thought so - that, when attempting to communicate, the intent with which you speak is irrelevant to the effect your words produce in your interlocutor. Unless your intent is actually to piss people off - and I see no reason to suspect that it is - then using a rhetorical structure which consistently produces that effect is counterproductive. If your intent is to inspire sympathy for the contention that there's something "elite" about having access to fresh apples, regardless of any surrounding circumstance, then using a rhetorical structure which consistently antagonizes people, and thus is much more likely to depress the tendency to sympathy among the already unconvinced than to inspire it, is counterproductive as well. And arguing that those whom you so anger and antagonize, are in the wrong to feel so, only compounds the error.
It's not that I fail to understand the concept - I expect I should do, considering I deployed it often enough myself back in my doctrinaire-progressive youth. And it's not that I fail to grasp that your intent is not to give insult - even if my own experience could not inform me on the other side of the question, mere charity would require I not so presume.
The problem I have is, quite simply, that the rhetoric you are using, in any case save when talking to someone who already agrees with you in every meaningful particular, does not work. Outside that very specific internecine context, the only thing it achieves is to make people angry, and that helps nothing and nobody as far as I can see.
I concede that concision isn't my firet skill. That said, if it's obfuscatory, it's not deliberately so, and it sounds as though you took my point regardless.
I understand your point. I don't agree with it. I don't think the meaning of the word "privilege" has become so narrowly defined that it automatically provokes outrage like this.
If, in fact, "privilege" does in fact trigger this massive anger you say it does, then I totally agree that its use is counterproductive. I just don't see it.
I spent a while casting around for something close enough to my point that I could recommend it - rather than, for example, a Marxist critique of privilege theory which decried it for being not antinomian enough. Just as I was beginning to despair of the time I'd have to spend writing a long piece of my own on the subject, I ran across this:
I can't really claim with confidence that the book makes a point I'd be entirely happy with, because I'm only just about to start reading it myself. But this review, and what I'm seeing on its Amazon page, suggest that it's quite close at least to the point I'm trying to make, and so I recommend it sight unseen.
If you don't feel like making the purchase directly, email me at the address in my profile, and I'll gift you a copy in whichever format you prefer. In any case, I'll be interested to hear what you think of it.
The problem isn't that "privilege" has become too narrow, but that it's become too broad.
The word implies an actor. Privilege is, by definition, caused. A benefit of privilege by definition originates in a system of structural inequality, one more or less deliberately designed to benefit some, but not others, based on some criterion such as sex, skin color, sexual preference, or the like - and that's not a possibly tendentious definition of my own invention, but rather the one applied by the proponents of the concept, all the way back to McIntosh's formalization in the late 80s that began the modern popularization of "privilege" in the first place.
A further implication, also original but more clearly elucidated by Maltz Bovy, is that to do other than abandon or at least forswear the benefit of privilege, and work to dismantle the structural inequality that furnishes it, is iniquitous. To say that someone is or has been privileged therefore cannot but at minimum verge upon an accusation that that person lacks virtue. That, I think, is at base what provokes anger in response - and not unreasonably so, because it does constitute an attack on the quality of one's character. Even when leveled at someone who is progressive and does accept the theory of privilege without question, such an attack tends to elicit a defensive response. How much more so, then, from someone who is not, and does not?
And "privilege" remains so freighted, regardless of intent. It's especially pernicious, therefore, to conflate privilege with simple good fortune, which is fundamentally distinct in that good fortune isn't caused. It's just a thing that happens, and happens to work out well for someone. That's what we're talking about here. No system of structural inequality put those trees next to that hovel. You cannot reasonably posit a deliberately unequal allocation of benefit to have brought about that result. The very idea is risible at best, outright nonsense at worst. And, in stating nonetheless that that must be the case, you level the sort of opprobrious allegation I describe above.
It is not reasonable, nor is it acceptable in any conversational context where civility and charity are meant to hold sway, to offer one's interlocutor insult, then become incensed when said interlocutor responds as though insulted. Cet animal est très méchant: Quand on l'attaque, il se défend. Voltaire's sarcasm remains a sarcasm, whether you mean it so or otherwise.
Substitute "tenement apartment" for "shack" and "slumlord" for "former truck farmer", then subtract "living near formerly productive fruit trees". You now have a story that describes many times more people than your original.
The politics of privilege basically says that unless you have had the worst life that it is possible to have, you have to yield to anyone that had anything worse off than you. Since the word "elitism" is what brought all that into the conversation, perhaps it was a poor choice.
While at previous times in history, it might have been a mark of elite privilege to not have to pick your own fresh produce, that is no longer the case. Now, having fruit trees and a garden in your backyard means you are lucky enough to have direct control over a portion of your food supply, and can therefore choose to grow food with flavor and nutrition, rather than superior shelf life, visual appeal, and transportability--which are the characteristics that the grocery store will choose for you.
The apples that grew in my (rented) backyard as a kid were sour, with a woody texture, and were usually covered in wasps or ants. But they certainly did taste better than store-bought Red Delicious. The ants added a lemony flavor. I never thought to try the wasps.
I happen to like Red Delicious since they produce a satisfying crunch without being tart (like green apples) or mushy (like gala). I'm surprised this article is using a personal preference to criticize an entire variety and industry.
As someone who loves textures of foods, I empathize with the 'crunch' comment - though I will note that the only commendation you made about the flavor was expressing the Red Delicious's lack of flavor...
I liked Red Delicious back in the early 80s, but I noticed by the late 80s that they were becoming less flavorful, and tougher skinned. Now, the crunch and the visual is about all the red delicious has going for it.
I haven't seen Jonagold mentioned, but it's another one I like (though it doesn't store particularly well).
I think the minutiae of which apple cultivars we should buy is a not so delicious red herring from a more important truth: the worst Asian pear I've ever had is far and away better than the best apple I've ever had. My wife swears by apples though so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
they get very mealy and unpleasant in texture if they over-ripen even a little bit. gala are often recommended for baking for this reason. the texture degenerates very quickly, moreso than most varieties.
I was put off apples throughout childhood because of the taste of the Red Delcious, my mother only bought those, and I only returned to apples after working at a software company that supplied free apples (of various different types). Until then I had not known how tasty apples could be, now I eat a couple everyday.
Overall I just buy the cheap apples; the differences aren't significant except to a connoisseur (easily adjusted for with supplements), and I prefer to spend my money on startups.
Because taste and texture are obsolete; they don't really affect the outcomes of eating. Taste can be disguised with spices or condiments, and cooking and food processors will produce an edible texture out of almost anything. Nutritional variables are unaffected by these modifications, hence measure more of the underlying reality.
The most interesting part of this article is the last bit about China. It reminded me of an earlier article I saw on HN concerning the Asian market for wild ginkgo harvested in Appalachia.
It's becoming clear Chinese and American consumer behavior concerning food are vastly different from one another, and globalization has not eliminated all of those differences. Food is still one of America's biggest exports, so there may be a lot of undiscovered opportunities here for smart entrepreneurs in the food manufacturing industry to take advantage of these differences.
Politicians can create and trade restrictions and tax breaks, but they can't wave a magic wand and move consumer markets around more to their liking. The presence or absence of a market is what decides the viability of a business. Either the market's there or it's not.
I agree that red delicious are terrible eating apples but most of the newer varieties seem to be a bit on the sweet side for my liking. Braeburn has the perfect balance of tart and sweet while being consistently crisp.
A fresh red delicious apple is an extraordinary eating apple. As a kid, they were my favorite. But I was eating them from an orchard down the road. They're great for a week or so off the tree.
What they are not is a good storage apple, which is why their status as our primary commodity apple is strange.
They are. My second favorite apple after McIntosh. Neither's super common, at least in the Midwest, and unlike most US produce in grocery stores they seem to come and go (seasonally? But apples store/ship relatively well, so I dunno) even at the places that carry them.
Fuji, gala, and red delicious seem to be the most common. Honeycrisp and pink lady are often available.
Red Delicious are very sweet without much actual flavour. Granny Smiths are very tart and I can't understand why people actually like them (I have a theory it's because they consider them medicine rather than something to actually enjoy). I do like to use Granny Smith's for cooking, though. They are very flavourful and don't break down, but I add extra sugar, of course.
Cox's Orange Pippin is surely the ideal eating apple. A wonderful, complex flavour without being too sweet or too tart and it has an almost non-existent core. The seeds seem to just rattle around in there.
I like these ones - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Transparent
Unfortunately they are hard to come by even locally in ex-USSR because they are extremely fragile and no market want to handle their transportation or storage.
If you'll ever visit ex-USSR in late summer or early autumn ask for "byeliy naliv" apples (meaning something like "white shine"). They are green to white in color (more white as they are more ripe) and not very hard when ripe.
So, since it's spring - what's the good apples that are ripe first? Because basically I only buy Galas rather than figure out the complicated list of apples that are good for each season.
I never thought my taste for red delicious apples were something I'd have to feel about the way people did about eating McDonald's(I mean obv they're different, but..)
Interesting read, I have always preferred green apples to red apples. I even distinctly remember a day in kindergarten where we did a taste test - almost everyone in the class picked the green apples. I had never really understood why red apples were so popular, I hadn't realized there was a dominant type of red apple or what it's backstory was. I'll have to try a Honey Crisp or Gala next time I'm at the supermarket.
My son and I have settled on Gala and Fuji as our go-tos are the farmers market. I actually arrived at the same conclusion as this article about "Red Delicious" - it certainly is red and that's the most that can be said of it.
Red Delicious are absolutely the best apples for throwing at your enemies. They are also the best fruit to be stacked on a cart and driven through during the car chase scene of an action movie. They are also quite useful for making your business look like it has made a token effort towards providing fruits and vegetables for customers.
They are certainly poorly suited for actual eating.
Fujis have a good taste/price ratio, making them my default value option. Honeycrisps are great, but currently rather expensive. Hopefully that price can come down as more Red Delicious orchards are demolished and replaced.
The most bizarre part of the article is where it says people buy Red Delicious and just throw them away. While that would be insane for private residences, the Red Delicious is somewhat of a symbolic icon for "fruit". If you manage a convenience store, truck stop, or hotel breakfast nook, you can buy one Red Delicious and keep it around for a few months, secure in the knowledge that no one will be foolish enough to eat it. And the whole time it is not being eaten, you can advertise that you offer "fresh fruit".
Just look at your fruit at home. All that stuff gets eaten and replaced. If you go out on the road, the standard fruit basket becomes Red Delicious apples, small, hard oranges, and bananas--literally the three cheapest fruits you can buy in any grocery store. And the apples might as well be wooden apples, painted red, because when the bananas and oranges go, they remain.
Yes, we have the same list of go-tos. I've always called the subject of the article Red Undelicious. My dad always took one in his lunch so we always had Red undelicious around, but that only taught me I didn't like apples. Then one day I grew up and bought my own apples. There are so many to try.
I recently found a tree of unknown variety next to a Forest Service road in the mountains near me. I'm sure someone thew an apple core out the window many years ago. I had several people try them and all kinds of names were thrown out, but none of use could nail down what it was. Whatever it is, it is good!
Fujis are very nice but I notice that there is a lot more variance in their tartness level than in some other varieties. they tend to be on the sweet side, but some of them are much more tart than expected.
I buy a bushel of Jonagolds and two or three others each year (varieties depend on crop), and they're great for cooking or eating. I make around three gallons of apple butter and a gallon or two of spiced cider total, and I still have enough for at least two five pound pies and some for eating. Nice, firm apples that don't break down too readily when cooked and with a pleasant tartness.
I buy honeycrisps by the peck for eating, and I've tried cooking with mutsus, detroit reds, and september wonders, and few others, but jonathans and jonagolds have proven themselves staple worthy in my kitchen.
I don't really get the love for Honeycrisps. I mean, they're better than Red Deliciouses, sure. But they're still too... blandly sweet, I guess, for my tastes. I like Pink Ladies, and I like Granny Smiths. That sharper, more acidic taste, I suppose.
I am totally with you. I recently did an unscientific "apple tasting" experiment. While Honey Crisp are a good apple, they are just sweet and crisp but with no complexity or character. I deemed Granny Smith and Pink Ladies to be heads and shoulders above the rest with Honey Crisp a distant third.
Not the parent but I'll take a stab at this anyway. None of this is actually about moralizing, but very much about signaling that one is part of the cohort of "discerning" consumers (who wouldn't be caught dead, darling, eating a Red Delicious), and not among those great unwashed backwoods jerkwater hordes who eat them because they don't know any better. Hence the religion-like simplicity of the message "red delicious bad" which bears some similarity to a moral pronouncement while not actually being one.
Whatever. Red Delicious, Gala, even Mackintosh (remember them? usually for pie)... they're all good. Red Delicious is unfashionable, plain and simple. I find them great, when fresh. They get mealy/mushy when they've been sitting around too long.
Can’t someone just dislike a type of apple without it being a political statement?
I have thought “red delicious” were terrible since grade school, when they used to hand them out as snacks, and I promise you that 6-year-old me was not trying to signal anything.
Sure, you can dislike it. Or like it. That's basically my point - there's no need to attach all the extra ridiculousness to it and make it into a "statement" of any kind.
I've avoided Red Delicious for years. Nobody told me to, I just realized they sucked. I didn't know this was a common opinion until reading these comments. (And given their prevalence in grocery store produce departments, I'm still not convinced.)
This nonsense where every expression of opinion or preference is labeled as "signaling" has got to stop.
No "k" in Macintosh, but this is a weird statement to me. Macs are very popular in Canada and virtually every grocery store that I've been in carries them (in Ontario anyways). They can be really excellent fresh off the tree but are generally a fair to middling apple in my opinion.
Something I like about home canning my own applesauce is bug-leg-free applesauce is commercially unavailable in stores, its safe to eat buggy applesauce but pretty gross once you have a source of bug-leg-free applesauce. Also if you follow the USDA/BallBook you can't vary lemon content for food safety reasons but you can vary cinnamon and its an eternal experiment to try different ratios. Also there are USDA approved low/no sugar applesauce recipes but in the store you can only buy corn syrup or artificial sweetener applesauce.
Anyway to make a long story short, store applesauce is gross, few hobbies are as delicious as home canning applesauce, and I've had "OK" results with red delicious in applesauce form. Its not pure red evil or whatever as the article claims.
Next story, lets debate Concord grapes, vs Flame seedless, in raw and home canned jelly form.