Tyler Cowen asks a question I was just asking myself: What went wrong with red delicious apples? According to Why the Red Delicious No Longer Is, breeders kept tinkering until they ended up with a red, not-delicious apple:
Consider the fate of America’s favorite apple. It emerged from an Iowa orchard in 1880 as a round, blushed yellow fruit of surpassing sweetness.But like a figure in a TV makeover show, it was an apple that its handlers could not leave alone. They altered its shape. They made it firmer and more juicy. They made it so it could be stored in hermetically sealed warehouses for 12 months. Along the way, they changed its color and hence its name — to Red Delicious.
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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.“Did they do it because it has less flavor? Obviously not,” said Eugene M. Kupferman, a post-harvest specialist at Washington State University’s tree fruit research center in Wenatchee, Wash. “They did it because it has better legs and they are getting more money for it.”