I wish they'd sell old varieties of apples. The new ones all insist of having Red Delicious (so called) as part of the genetic makeup. It does not impart a good flavor. There are all these nice old ones, like Cortland and Winesap, but you can't get them anywhere.
In Sweden and I think Europe, there seems to be quite much product development in apples. I think one of the reasons is that storage seems to have been more or less perfected so that the produce can be sold over almost a whole year.
Using only traditional methods there are several "new" Swedish varieties, Aroma, Frida and Saga that are very nice - and especially Saga is absolutely fantastic - On par or better that international varieties Jazz, Pink Lady and Honeycrisp.
Some of the more traditional varieties are also sold more and for a longer period because of the improved storage, even though that I think they have a shorter storage window.
Another reason I think is that not all of these varieties thrive as small trees, and most factory farmed trees are kept small because it makes picking them easier.
Honeycrisp is still a grandchild of golden delicious, though as it turns out not the one the university intended. They claimed it was Macoun and Honeygold but it was a different one of their test experiments after genetic testing.
The implication was that red delicious are kind of garbage and definitely pedestrian and it’s the same company that introduced both to the world. So I’m lumping them into the same boat on general principle. As an adult I won’t touch red delicious but I will once in a while eat a golden.
But the thing is that apples the size for eating are all tetraploid mutants, but meiosis does not guarantee that the pollinated flower receives 2 full sets of genes from both parents. So you get a lot of giant grab apples which are okay for cider or a pectin source for making jam but that’s about it. Most of the modern crosses are coming from one or two ag universities running giant breeding programs.
They say that you need about a thousand (or was it 10,000?) saplings to yield one interesting specimen. Mark Shepard has a sort of yolo mentality here does wild crosse and grows what he can, which is only in the hundreds, and culls any trees that struggle, because he doesn’t want to throw good time after bad. And sells his surplus for root stock. His thought is that if enough farmers do it then one of them will win the lottery. He likes to diversify and hedge his bets.
There's an apple orchard that sells at the farmers market in my city with >40 seasonal varieties, most of which you'd never see at a supermarket. Apples grow well in a lot of the US, its worth looking for local options
I always feel personally attacked when people bad-mouth (ha) the Red Delicious. It's true that many are this mealy disaster -- but I think that's a product of crappy long cellar times and trying to get money for 'old' apples. If you get a good fresh one, it should be the right level of tart, sweet, crisp, and juicy. And when they are good, they are probably my favorite. It's just so damn hard to get the good ones and no great ways to tell if they're good before biting in.
That makes sense, they were by far the prettiest apples at the orchard near me. Of course that just makes it all the more disappointing when you go to eat one.
Depends on where you are maybe? Cortland is still readily available here (Quebec). Hope it stays that way, I'm feeling slightly worried. Seems like the trend of trademarked new apple varieties has not quite caught up here yet as orchards are not interested in replacing tried and true stocks.
Yeah, I think my neighbor has a few Cortland trees in New England. Lots of Mcintoshes which aren't great for cooking but generally good for eating. Apples are probably about the last thing I'd say you couldn't get varieties of.
The improvements in fruit over the years has improved my quality of life so much. If you have never tried a sumo citrus, I recommend it -- they are only in season till April iirc.
Benefits of sumo citrus:
Easy to peel
Pith does not remain attached to orange
Super juicy
Excellent taste and texture, balanced acid and sugar levels.
Funny enough I was eating a Sumo as I came across your comment. They are certainly very tasty, but for the price (which is high at least here in Ohio) I much prefer the tartness of a traditional in-season California satsuma.
All the California satsumas I can find here in California have all converged on the dekopon/Sumo taste and form. It’s confusing because the satsumas on Google images are still mostly the round ones without the bumps.
The prices vary wildly. At the end of the season I can find them in some ethnic grocers for $0.33 a pound while right now they’re $1.50-2 a pound. When they were first coming out years ago they were $4 a piece at Trader Joes.
There are dekopon trees that give fruit with the bump and without the bump. You may be finding the ones without the bump. But satsumas have a different enough flavor that you should be able to tell. Also, satsumas are smaller, more oblong, and tend to have a thinner skin.
It depends on the season, but they tend to have too much acid at first. Leaving them in the fridge reduces the acid over time improves the flavor profile. But really you should refrigerate all citrus.
Similarly, the Tango variety is becoming more commercially available. It has a zipper peel, seedless, and outstanding flavor. It's usually marketed as "Mandarin", though. You kind of have to know what it looks like to be able to tell what's a clementine or not.
Others to watch out for are Gold Nugget (my favorite, but I very rarely see them at the store), and I also saw Kishu at the grocery store for the first time this year.
I love fruits and vegetables, and am excited about this! That said, I do worry long-term about changes to increase sugar content. Sure it’s delicious, but I think it’s almost strictly worse for me. If only the high-sugar items sell, it will become harder to find low-sugar items. Not to mention the amount of self-control that will be required.
One thing I love about low-sugar citrus is the ability for it to not spike my sugar levels.
I use Miracle Fruit extract which alters the taste buds temporarily to turn sour flavors into sweet flavors. I can eat an entire lime and it tastes like sweet candy, with no real sugar content. No artificial sweetening either.
Faced with a full-length pop-up saying they care about my privacy just made me think, "if you cared about my privacy, you wouldn't track me and therefore wouldn't need ny consent for anything"
one thing I don't like about fruits nowadays is that they're too sweet, I don't remember grape being so sweets when I was younger for example, it's like eating sugary water.
I don't really care if my food is GMO as much as I worry about nutrient content being reduced to cut costs.
What is the incentive here?
I don't want to live in a world where fruit is bastardized into candy, meat is missing amino acids in the protein, and everyone has fucking diabetes as a result and dies at 40.
We don't even need gene editing to have seen this game played before. It happened throughout the previous century. Look at the history of iceberg lettuce and other watery slop like cheap tomatoes.
There's some compelling reasoning that dwarfism to maximize produce size has contributed substantially to the reduction in nutrients.
Because when the tree fruits, it pulls nutrients out of the rest of the plant. And if there's less plant, then you get produce that's more water and carbon and less nutrient.
The Economist tries hard to normalize GMO food, without ever raising the issues and addressing them.
Whatever one thinks of that issue, this technique is deception: It decieves people into thinking that it's normal, that there are no issues; it makes it easy to just follow, hard to question. People follow norms, and that's how you convice them to put aside their concerns.
> Over thousands of years of domestication, humans have moulded fruit to their liking. ... As Pairwise’s blackberries and cherries show, advances in gene editing are allowing fruits to be altered in new ways. crispr, the most popular such technique at the moment ...
> The European Union’s Parliament and Council, the bloc’s governing body, reached a provisional deal in December to “simplify” the process for marketing plants bred through new genomic techniques, such as by scrapping the need to label them any differently from conventional ones. That seems an appropriately fruitful approach.
But there is this interesting tidbit, purely from the money-making perspective:
> ... unlike existing genetically modified crops, those made using crispr do not require dna from a foreign organism to be inserted—a practice that experience shows puts customers off.
I could agree to a point, the most commonly planted GMO crops are Roundup-Ready grains and soy, which encourage spraying even more atrazine on fields[1]. That does of course also mean increased yields, but the tradeoff is not unambiguously good. However the varieties discussed in this article clearly don't have that problem, knocking out genes to emphasize desirable characteristics seems much more appealing, though I suppose I'd rather see increasing nutrient density over making seeds less chewy, even if that meant adding DNA from other plants[2].
>Whatever one thinks of that issue, this technique is deception: It decieves people into thinking that it's normal, that there are no issues; it makes it easy to just follow, hard to question. People follow norms, and that's how you convice them to put aside their concerns.
Should every article about vaccines also include a disclaimer about how some people think they cause autism?
If your goal is to help allay the fears of people who hold that view, then obviously, yes!
If your goal is constantly punch down and find a class of people you're "allowed" to bully for thinking differently, then by all means, proceed as you have.
I have no doubt that blackberries will go this direction because it's annoying to get seeds stuck in your teeth. On the other hand, compare the fiber of blackberries (8g in one cup) to modern grapes (1g in one cup).
New cultivars are kinda screwing up classic canning recipes because a common change is more neutral pH, which makes them more susceptible to decay organisms.
I wish they'd sell old varieties of apples. The new ones all insist of having Red Delicious (so called) as part of the genetic makeup. It does not impart a good flavor. There are all these nice old ones, like Cortland and Winesap, but you can't get them anywhere.
In Sweden and I think Europe, there seems to be quite much product development in apples. I think one of the reasons is that storage seems to have been more or less perfected so that the produce can be sold over almost a whole year.
Using only traditional methods there are several "new" Swedish varieties, Aroma, Frida and Saga that are very nice - and especially Saga is absolutely fantastic - On par or better that international varieties Jazz, Pink Lady and Honeycrisp.
Some of the more traditional varieties are also sold more and for a longer period because of the improved storage, even though that I think they have a shorter storage window.
Another reason I think is that not all of these varieties thrive as small trees, and most factory farmed trees are kept small because it makes picking them easier.
I love Boskoop, and they are thankfully still all over German supermarkets. If not, Holstein Cox will do, and if they have it, Elstar.
The real good ones, like Berlepsch, are hard to find here, though, unless you travel to a plantation.
Also love Boskoop, but I feel like they can be more difficult to find than other Apples in German supermarkets.
Any other Apple variety just feels not nearly as juice and regularly too sweet for my taste - especially when you want to use them for baking.
+1 on Boskoop. But also Cox Orange and James Grief
Cosmic crisp seems very commonly available(at least, here in colorado) and has a great taste and texture with no red delicious genes present
Honeycrisp is still a grandchild of golden delicious, though as it turns out not the one the university intended. They claimed it was Macoun and Honeygold but it was a different one of their test experiments after genetic testing.
Yes, I think both enterprise and honey crisp partially descend from golden delicious, but golden and red delicious are not actually closely related
The implication was that red delicious are kind of garbage and definitely pedestrian and it’s the same company that introduced both to the world. So I’m lumping them into the same boat on general principle. As an adult I won’t touch red delicious but I will once in a while eat a golden.
But the thing is that apples the size for eating are all tetraploid mutants, but meiosis does not guarantee that the pollinated flower receives 2 full sets of genes from both parents. So you get a lot of giant grab apples which are okay for cider or a pectin source for making jam but that’s about it. Most of the modern crosses are coming from one or two ag universities running giant breeding programs.
They say that you need about a thousand (or was it 10,000?) saplings to yield one interesting specimen. Mark Shepard has a sort of yolo mentality here does wild crosse and grows what he can, which is only in the hundreds, and culls any trees that struggle, because he doesn’t want to throw good time after bad. And sells his surplus for root stock. His thought is that if enough farmers do it then one of them will win the lottery. He likes to diversify and hedge his bets.
There's an apple orchard that sells at the farmers market in my city with >40 seasonal varieties, most of which you'd never see at a supermarket. Apples grow well in a lot of the US, its worth looking for local options
I always feel personally attacked when people bad-mouth (ha) the Red Delicious. It's true that many are this mealy disaster -- but I think that's a product of crappy long cellar times and trying to get money for 'old' apples. If you get a good fresh one, it should be the right level of tart, sweet, crisp, and juicy. And when they are good, they are probably my favorite. It's just so damn hard to get the good ones and no great ways to tell if they're good before biting in.
I've picked them straight from the tree and they still end up a mealy disaster. But hey, maybe I'm just bad at picking 'em.
They’ve long since been overbred to look pretty at the price of texture. They’ve done the same to Macintosh, too.
That makes sense, they were by far the prettiest apples at the orchard near me. Of course that just makes it all the more disappointing when you go to eat one.
Oddly enough, the same exact thing has happened to Macintosh computers...
Because golden delicious and red delicious were everywhere in the 90's and spontaneous hybridization is a very, very low success rate.
Ambrosia apples appear to be a spontaneous cross of grandchildren of Golden and Red delicious apples.
I’d like to see a citation - I’m not sure this Red Delicious assertion is true.
Depends on where you are maybe? Cortland is still readily available here (Quebec). Hope it stays that way, I'm feeling slightly worried. Seems like the trend of trademarked new apple varieties has not quite caught up here yet as orchards are not interested in replacing tried and true stocks.
Yeah, I think my neighbor has a few Cortland trees in New England. Lots of Mcintoshes which aren't great for cooking but generally good for eating. Apples are probably about the last thing I'd say you couldn't get varieties of.
Not if you have a local amish plug
Have you ever even Honey-Crisped, Bro?
The improvements in fruit over the years has improved my quality of life so much. If you have never tried a sumo citrus, I recommend it -- they are only in season till April iirc.
Benefits of sumo citrus: Easy to peel Pith does not remain attached to orange Super juicy Excellent taste and texture, balanced acid and sugar levels.
https://archive.is/wBogT
Funny enough I was eating a Sumo as I came across your comment. They are certainly very tasty, but for the price (which is high at least here in Ohio) I much prefer the tartness of a traditional in-season California satsuma.
All the California satsumas I can find here in California have all converged on the dekopon/Sumo taste and form. It’s confusing because the satsumas on Google images are still mostly the round ones without the bumps.
The prices vary wildly. At the end of the season I can find them in some ethnic grocers for $0.33 a pound while right now they’re $1.50-2 a pound. When they were first coming out years ago they were $4 a piece at Trader Joes.
There are dekopon trees that give fruit with the bump and without the bump. You may be finding the ones without the bump. But satsumas have a different enough flavor that you should be able to tell. Also, satsumas are smaller, more oblong, and tend to have a thinner skin.
Japan does have the bumpy ones. Clementines tend to be more thin-skinned.
I highly recommend trying a cold Sumo. Refrigerated sumos are a bit of an aranciata vibe.
Sumos are bright and brightly flavored fruit often have a better experience when chilled.
It depends on the season, but they tend to have too much acid at first. Leaving them in the fridge reduces the acid over time improves the flavor profile. But really you should refrigerate all citrus.
Nah. Mandarins I prefer at room temperature. But I refrigerate apples because I like the crunch.
It is always a good time of year then they come along. I have had WAY too many of them but thats not going to stop me from having many more.
Similarly, the Tango variety is becoming more commercially available. It has a zipper peel, seedless, and outstanding flavor. It's usually marketed as "Mandarin", though. You kind of have to know what it looks like to be able to tell what's a clementine or not.
Others to watch out for are Gold Nugget (my favorite, but I very rarely see them at the store), and I also saw Kishu at the grocery store for the first time this year.
Like sumo, but love minneola!
I love fruits and vegetables, and am excited about this! That said, I do worry long-term about changes to increase sugar content. Sure it’s delicious, but I think it’s almost strictly worse for me. If only the high-sugar items sell, it will become harder to find low-sugar items. Not to mention the amount of self-control that will be required.
One thing I love about low-sugar citrus is the ability for it to not spike my sugar levels.
I use Miracle Fruit extract which alters the taste buds temporarily to turn sour flavors into sweet flavors. I can eat an entire lime and it tastes like sweet candy, with no real sugar content. No artificial sweetening either.
I worry for your enamel.
It's not like I'm eating a lime every hour, or every day. It's just an example.
Faced with a full-length pop-up saying they care about my privacy just made me think, "if you cared about my privacy, you wouldn't track me and therefore wouldn't need ny consent for anything"
They bury the "Reject" button behind two clicks too.
one thing I don't like about fruits nowadays is that they're too sweet, I don't remember grape being so sweets when I was younger for example, it's like eating sugary water.
They're a disaster. I have had to stop eating bananas and grapes for this reason. Also, taking the seeds out of grapes makes them much less healthy.
I thought bananas have been the same variety for a very long time now?
have you had those cotton candy grapes?
no, but judging by the name I take they're super sweet?
They taste like cotton candy. It's the ultimate "wtf is going on with grapes?!" grape
I don't really care if my food is GMO as much as I worry about nutrient content being reduced to cut costs.
What is the incentive here?
I don't want to live in a world where fruit is bastardized into candy, meat is missing amino acids in the protein, and everyone has fucking diabetes as a result and dies at 40.
We don't even need gene editing to have seen this game played before. It happened throughout the previous century. Look at the history of iceberg lettuce and other watery slop like cheap tomatoes.
My GMO concerns are all centered around the vulnerability of monoculture crops. Having a variety seems to make the food supply more resilient.
There's some compelling reasoning that dwarfism to maximize produce size has contributed substantially to the reduction in nutrients.
Because when the tree fruits, it pulls nutrients out of the rest of the plant. And if there's less plant, then you get produce that's more water and carbon and less nutrient.
The Economist tries hard to normalize GMO food, without ever raising the issues and addressing them.
Whatever one thinks of that issue, this technique is deception: It decieves people into thinking that it's normal, that there are no issues; it makes it easy to just follow, hard to question. People follow norms, and that's how you convice them to put aside their concerns.
> Over thousands of years of domestication, humans have moulded fruit to their liking. ... As Pairwise’s blackberries and cherries show, advances in gene editing are allowing fruits to be altered in new ways. crispr, the most popular such technique at the moment ...
> The European Union’s Parliament and Council, the bloc’s governing body, reached a provisional deal in December to “simplify” the process for marketing plants bred through new genomic techniques, such as by scrapping the need to label them any differently from conventional ones. That seems an appropriately fruitful approach.
But there is this interesting tidbit, purely from the money-making perspective:
> ... unlike existing genetically modified crops, those made using crispr do not require dna from a foreign organism to be inserted—a practice that experience shows puts customers off.
I could agree to a point, the most commonly planted GMO crops are Roundup-Ready grains and soy, which encourage spraying even more atrazine on fields[1]. That does of course also mean increased yields, but the tradeoff is not unambiguously good. However the varieties discussed in this article clearly don't have that problem, knocking out genes to emphasize desirable characteristics seems much more appealing, though I suppose I'd rather see increasing nutrient density over making seeds less chewy, even if that meant adding DNA from other plants[2].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_tomato#Biotechnology
Your comment presupposes the benefits of GMO agriculture are outweighed by the costs. If we make assertions, we should back them up.
> The Economist tries hard to normalize GMO food, without ever raising the issues and addressing them.
And you also did not raise any issue, just asserted that there are some. GMO is amazing.
>Whatever one thinks of that issue, this technique is deception: It decieves people into thinking that it's normal, that there are no issues; it makes it easy to just follow, hard to question. People follow norms, and that's how you convice them to put aside their concerns.
Should every article about vaccines also include a disclaimer about how some people think they cause autism?
If your goal is to help allay the fears of people who hold that view, then obviously, yes!
If your goal is constantly punch down and find a class of people you're "allowed" to bully for thinking differently, then by all means, proceed as you have.
I have no doubt that blackberries will go this direction because it's annoying to get seeds stuck in your teeth. On the other hand, compare the fiber of blackberries (8g in one cup) to modern grapes (1g in one cup).
New cultivars are kinda screwing up classic canning recipes because a common change is more neutral pH, which makes them more susceptible to decay organisms.
Honeycrisps and red Fuji are pretty high.
Label the fruit as a gmo and the market for them collapses. Which is why we're not allowed to have clear stickers at the store.
Glad I live where growing this unnecessary genetically engineered shit is illegal. Patents on food shouldn't exist.
Plant patents predate GMOs. If you cross-pollinate or graft into a new cultivar, you can patent it.
Here's a climbing rose patent from 1930: https://patents.google.com/patent/USPP1P/en
What makes this 'shit' for you compared to the fruits we've conventionally engineered into unnatural forms via selective breeding?
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