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Comment by chihuahua | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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.

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