The rise and fall of the Red Delicious apple. Selected and bred for by color and storability, vastly overplanted, now it turns out that folks just don’t like the way it tastes.
In the 1980s heyday of the Red Delicious, it represented three-quarters of the harvest in Washington state, epicenter of the apple industry. By 2000, it made up less than half, and in 2003, the crop had shrunk to just 37 percent of the state’s harvest of 103 million boxes. Red Delicious remains the single largest variety produced in the state, but others are ascending in market share as rapidly as Red Delicious is dropping, notably Fuji and Gala.
[…] Who’s to blame for the decline of Red Delicious? Everyone, it seems. Consumers were drawn to the eye candy of brilliantly red apples, so supermarket chains paid more for them. Thus, breeders and nurseries patented and propagated the most rubied mutations, or “sports,” that they could find, and growers bought them by the millions, knowing that these thick-skinned wonders also would store for ages.
(via Kottke)
I love Gala’s and Fuji’s…they have taste and arn’t just so much cardboard like fiber that the Red Delicious’s are.
The most comments I ever got on a blog post was about a kind of tomatoes that are very hard to get here up North. Several people wrote in to tell me that I just don’t know how to eat a tomato.
I worked in a Washington apple orchard in my early teen years and definitely prefer gala apples. They taste better and have better texture. Won’t waste my time on Red Delicious.