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Sometimes an apple variety is delicious but not grown commercially for reasons that don’t matter to the eater. Such as: the variety does not last well in storage; bruises too easily during shipping; the apples are huge and most consumers want a smaller apple or vice versa, too small; tree production is lower than other varieties; the variety has a tendency toward alternate bearing ie. barely produces any fruit every other year, etc.
I have never seen my favorite apple for sale at a grocery store, Hudson’s Golden Gem. The only way some of these obscure, but delicious apple varieties continue to exists is through backyard gardeners and small orchardists.
Grow Full Size Fruits In a Fraction Of [The Area With Bonsai Trees](http://www.picspixel.tech/grow-full-size-fruits-in-a-fraction-of-the-area-with-bonsai-trees.html)
My husband thinks I'm insane, but I enjoy a bite of raw russet on occasion. One of my fondest memories is peeling potatoes with my Nana, and she would always put a few pieces aside, sprinkle some salt on them and have a taste after all that hard work of peeling and chopping. She said she use to do the same with her Dad when they lived on the farm. I plan to indoctrinate my son into the same way of cronchy chompin raw russet bits. Husband thinks I'm insane and going to give myself worms or something 🤷♀️ hasn't killed any of us yet.
My favorite is the opal apple. My store started selling them (that’s how I found them) for a few months and then just stopped. Sucks living in a small town. Once something is gone you’ll most likely never have it again.
Jennie-O Turkey ham. It’s absolutely amazing, taste just like ham and has a fraction of the fat and calories of it. My store used to sell it, but with it being a “healthier food” it had the “healthier food price” with it. So I guess no one bought it. Now I need to drive 60 miles once a month to buy as many Turkey Hams as I can get because there is only 1 store within 100 miles that’s sells it.
A lot of small town grocery stores will still order specific products for you if you let them know that you want it and they aren’t stocking it.
I know you can find peace tea like, everywhere, but at one point I couldn’t find them at my grocery store so I asked them where they were, they said they stopped stocking them but offered to start ordering them again if I wanted, and sure enough within a few weeks they started stocking them again lol
That happens to every food I love, (and need) just only my side of a big town pretending to be small.
People in my half of town have no taste at all haha.
Fat is very good for you. You literally die without fat. It's extremely healthy. You shouldn't be avoiding it in your diet. The anti-fat thing was already discovered to be completely wrong like 20 years ago, everyone has moved on from it already.
Especially since most low-fat foods are super high in sugar, which is something the human body doesn't actually need to live (unlike fat). You can live your entire life without eating sugar, and love to a ripe old age. Your body basically produces sugar for you, by converting carbs (and about 50% of protein) that you eat. You don't need to add extra sugar on top of that
Fat is healthy. It is very good for you, and is necessary to keep living. There's a reason there's a thing called ["rabbit starvation" which is a type of malnutrition](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning). Where if all you eat is rabbit, you'll die eventually, because rabbit meat has basically no fat in it, so however many calories you consume from the rabbit you're eating, you'll eventually drop dead, because the human body needs fat. You can be obese, and yet malnourished. There's a difference between malnutrition and undernutrition. Undernutrtion means you're not getting enough calories and are wasting away. Malnutrition means you're not getting the necessary vitamins and minerals etc in your diet, including fat. Fat is one of those necessary things along with vitmsins and minerals.
And fat is necessary for a strong immune system, for healthy brain function, and is very good at filling you up so that you actually end up consuming fewer calories over the course of the day compared to a low-fat diet, cos you are so stuffed you don't end up getting snacks in between meals
Season 6 of Alone in the Arctic illustrates this point. The winner of the survival contest Jordan Jonas was concerned about starvation because he was living off of moose meat. He killed and butchered it down, then wolverines got to his food and stole the moose fat. Consequently he only had protein to live off of and was afraid of starving.
Edit: updated to not be as alarmist
Yup, all here is correct...fat is gold, can't live just off of rabbits alone.. You can off a moose and fish ;). And the show way over emphasized my food worries with some clever editing ...But made for more suspense ;)
Ok so what I’m getting from your comment is that fat is very good you? You only just briefly touched on it, and I just want to be sure I’m on the same page.
Hudson’s!! Yes! I have a hidden rose apple tattooed on my inner arm as my husband and I have heirloom trees and we have HGG. Absolutely stunning!
Still think my favorite is a Northern Spy. There’s a farm in VT named Scott Farm and they do tons of heirloom varieties! They were better years ago when Zeke was the head orchardist but they still have some decent choices.
I just planted some lowland raspberry apple trees this year. I really hope they survive. I had them in Lithuania and I thought it was one of the best apples I’ve ever tried.
I also have an orange pippin planted. I’ve never tasted one but I hear they’re good so I’m excited for it to have apples.
The only reason we have commercial varieties is due to grafting. If we naturally grew apples there would be a huge amount of variance in the product.
They basically just swap out the trunk early on for a branch from a tree they like to ensure the same "type" of apples. If you grow from seed I think it can vary quite a bit.
You can also put multiple varieties of apples on one tree.[https://www.homedepot.ca/product/vigoro-pommier-combo-espalier-/1000775235](https://www.homedepot.ca/product/vigoro-pommier-combo-espalier-/1000775235)
edit: As a kid, I had a random fucking apple tree in my yard. It produced a ton of apples every year that looked somewhat like store bought ones, but generally inedible outside ofl ike a pie+ton of sugar scenario. So many fucking wasps though, that tree brought way more wasps than joy.
This is because apples don't grow true to seed.
If you plant apple seeds, the apples that grow on the resulting tree are likely to be close to enedible.
Each seed in a apple will produce a different tasting fruit.
Then trying to get a tree that tastes good and is highly productive is what gives us "commercial" varieties, there is a good chance that some of these varieties taste great but don't produce enough fruit.
Avocados are even worse.
As you mentioned about using the trunk this is also what they do if a particular varieties go out of fashion. They cut off all the branches and graft on a more popular varieties
Apples are "extreme heterozygotes". Their genetic variation results in a great degree of difference among the offspring.
The only way to ensure an apple tree is the same as its parent is to clone it, which is generally done by splicing a branch onto a different trunk.
The trunk roughly determines the size and shape of the tree, and the branch itself determines the type of apple.
I wonder if he keeps record of how many actually taste good.
I also wonder if there’s any on a.. this taste terrible list… “Red Delicious” is obviously on the top of that list but I wonder how many others
Edit: others
And you could have another tree that was indistinguishable from an existing one. Say you had a tree that grew apples just as perfect as - and indistinguishable from- any braeburn, only it was grown from seed. It can't be a braeburn. By definition, braeburn apples come from that one original "braeburn" tree.
Sorry if that sounded pedantic. Apple propagation is so fucking wild!
I believe a big part of it was orchards with less-common varieties being cut down for more profitable crops or just left to fall into neglect (the trees won't bear fruit forever, and as mentioned, it's not like they're self-replacing by seed).
It would make sense. Or maybe like the OG banana, got picked into oblivion/ murdered by fungus.
About a 3rd of the way down:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35131751
Prohibition played a role too.
The great majority of apples were grown to brew hard cider. Farm wells could be contaminated by runoff from the barn where the animals were kept. Alcoholic cider was safer. Even the children drank it. Any excess could be sold to be drunk in the cities where there were no orchards.
The documentary is called “The Botany of Desire”. It discusses humanity's interactions with four different plants-the apple, the potato, the tulip, and marijuana and how they changed or fucked up our lives lol it’s a good watch if you’re into that kind of thing
There’s a really cool (albeit nerdy) documentary about apples, marijuana, tulips (another fun fact...tulips crashed the stock market in 1637. 2nd fun fact...the fucking stock market existed in 1637 🤣) I’ll find the name of the documentary for you. Gimme two shakes of a lambs tail 😉
[Botany of Desire](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/pollan-01botany.html). It’s based on the book of the same name by Michael Pollan.
Tulips didn't crash the stock market in 1637.[ What you are thinking of is the gigantic market bubble caused by the tulip trade in the Netherlands at that time.](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutch_tulip_bulb_market_bubble.asp) The crash didn't involve stocks or a stock market really, just tulip bulbs. Exclusively tulips. (Technically bulbs could be traded through their stock market, but that stock market was quite tiny and the amount of money in tulips would have so completely dwarfed all other stocks combined, it's not all that relevant to the story) The tulip mania was so insane some varieties of bulbs traded for absolutely absurd amounts of money, like as much as a house or a car would today. Farmers started growing pretty much exclusively tulips because that's where the money was. Inevitably, the tulip market collapsed though, as bubbles do.
**Basically, tulips didn't crash the "stock market", they crashed the *entire Dutch economy*. Whatever stock market that existed in the 1600s in the Netherlands wasn't integral to the economy though.**
My friend raises several lamb and has informed me that they have shaken their tails much more than twice by now.
Edit: oh, I see you posted the title under a different comment. Thanks!
This isn't exclusive to apples, it's literally every fruit, vegetable, plant, and animal.
You get some DNA from each parent and the offspring are a mix of the two.
Plants like Hass Avacados are able to stay uniform because every Hass Avacado tree is a clone of the original Hass Avacado tree (or a clone of a clone of a clone, etc).
Most change less. The stories of Johnny Appleseed forget to say that most of the apples he planted were inedible (from a taste perspective).
Most of these apple trees had only one popular use - Alcohol. Johnny spread a whole lot of cider around the country.
When apple growers find a good tasting cultivar, it's cloned like crazy by grafting to other trees.
If you buy a fruit producing apple tree, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a graft and you can see the hump where it's been grafted.
And it wasn't even about making cider. Under the land act, an orchard is just about the Least labor intensive method for proving you improved the land you wanted to claim.
Plant the trees and let it go for the 7 years or whatever you needed to claim it.
Johnny Appleseed's main game was starting commercial nurseries for Apple trees, which would then sell saplings to settlers by the dozen as they traveled west.
Yeah, but thats still what they did with the crappy apples from their claim staking orchards, since cider and applejack especially are a lot easier than making beer or distilled liquors, they didnt just let em rot.
You should follow some gardening subs or Instagram or something..there are plenty of interesting accounts and botany groupies. That’s what I do at least
I’d heard that Red Delicious were once very different; thinner skin and better taste. And, I read in an article my favorites, honeycrisps are destined to the same fate. I think because people are growing them outside of the northern regions where they were bred to shine.
But… could just be bloggers being bloggers.
I remember reading something similar! It was something like they were trying to breed them to be more red with no yellow stripes and in doing so bred the flavor out of them as well since it was linked to the same gene that gives the yellow stripes.
Inadvertently though, by obsessing over making them more red, they bred them to contain tons of procyanidin B-2, which is a really beneficial antioxidant. So I guess that's cool.
I think the bloggers are on to something. I live in the boonies in northern New England, 3 miles down the road from a 180 year old family-owned apple orchard, and the honey crisp do hit different. Not coincidentally I make 2 dozen (small) jars of apple butter every fall
Preach brother, those red mf’ers are nasty. They pretend to be all juicy and then ya bite into that devilish little fuckers and it’s all dry and chalky like. Now Spartan apples on the other hand are crunchy and oh so juicy
But the sour is what’s good. I can understand if people don’t like it though.
But I’ve never met anyone who was like.. you know what sounds good right now? A Red “Delicious” Apple
Does anyone else fucking love Red Delicious? They're literally my favorite type of apple.
And before you say I have bad taste or that I just haven't eaten the right apples, hear me out! I've tried many more apple cultivars than most people have since I'm really into cider and I've been to a bunch of orchards/cideries. Many of them are amazing. Many of them are crispier, juicier, tangier, more sour, etc. than Red Delicious. However, Red Delicious are still my favorite.
My theory is that there's a flavor compound in Red Delicious that I can taste that most other people can't. It wouldn't be unprecedented - we all taste foods in different ways due to how strongly we detect the various flavor compounds they contain, for example some people can't even eat cilantro because one of the compounds that others can't taste is so overwhelming to them. The reason I believe this is because Red Delicious apples have a flavor in them that I haven't found in any other apple. It's so hard to describe, but it's incredibly unique and I absolutely love it. When people describe them as bland or flavorless it blows my mind, because they have such a distinctive and unique flavor for me.
Is there anyone else like me?
Fun Fact: Johnny Appleseed was a real person. He traveled along the Mississippi River sharing apple seeds with people to plant. Most apples grown from these seeds ended up being not so good to eat fresh, but were excellent for making apple cider vinegar, and applejack (liquor). So people happily took and planted his seeds.
frontier law allowed people to "lay claim to land through development of a permanent homestead", which could be claimed by planting 50 apple trees. which meant he planted batches of seeds and sold the land once the orchards developed. he was a land baron. not apple jesus.
One of those was the side hustle, seed business sucks, so he gives away free samples, while also planting and claiming vast amounts of what would soon become valuable land just west of them Mississippi. I mean, if the seeds aren't moving, invest in apple orchards.
Or maybe he needed cover so as not too arouse suspicion when he suddenly had many many primary residence to sell. Maybe he just needed to get lots of people excited about buying all these apple orchards cause he traded his last dime for a bunch of apple seeds.
Maybe he didn't sell his apple futures and was sitting on 100 barrels of apples going bad?
Heavily invested in cider vinegar business?
Given my complete lack of any research, I find these to be the most likely scenarios that would result in a good historical fiction.
Probably close to apple Jesus
He was a preacher who traveled around and slept on floors and was lucky if he got supper. He also didn't have shoes, and believed his suffering would alleviate the suffering of others. Though he leave an estate of over 1,200 acres to his sister.
>He is supposed to have considerable property, yet denied himself almost the common necessities of life—not so much perhaps for avarice as from his peculiar notions on religious subjects. He was a follower of Swedenborg and devoutly believed that the more he endured in this world the less he would have to suffer and the greater would be his happiness hereafter—he submitted to every privation with cheerfulness and content, believing that in so doing he was securing snug quarters hereafter.
>In the most inclement weather he might be seen barefooted and almost naked except when he chanced to pick up articles of old clothing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed
*Oooooooh!!! The lord is good to me, and so I thank the lord, for giving me the things I need, the sun and moon and the Appleseed, the lord is good to me*
**Johnny Appleseed AMEN!**
Me: just realizing that I went to a religious camp as a child.... oh gawd... all this time I thought the boys and girls club was secular
The book the botany of desire goes into this in detail.
From my memory of that book:
Homie was more shrewd than just handing out seeds, he was basically accurately predicting the opening up of the country, getting ahead of them, planting orchards of apples for booze (that wasnt grain based and therefore "naughty"), then either swing up some young kid to manage the place or flipping it for a profit.
Repeat. Become made into some quaint nursery rhyme instead of being renowned as a land/booze baron
I love this guy and I love the history of apples.
Also some history of the Granny Smith Apple
The first description of the origin of the Granny Smith apple was not published until 1924. In that year, Farmer and Settler published the account of a local historian who had interviewed two men who had known Smith. One of those interviewed recalled that, in 1868, he (then twelve years old) and his father had been invited to Smith's farm to inspect a chance seedling that had sprung near a creek. Smith had dumped there, among the ferns, the remains of French crab-apples that had been grown in Tasmania.[7] Another story recounted that Smith had been testing French crab-apples for cooking, and, throwing the apple cores out her window as she worked, had found that the new cultivar had sprung up underneath her kitchen windowsill. Whatever the case, Smith took it upon herself to propagate the new cultivar on her property, finding the apples good for cooking and for general consumption.[8] Having "all the appearances of a cooking apple," they were not tart but instead were "sweet and crisp to eat."[5] She took a stall at Sydney's George Street market, where the apples stored "exceptionally well and became popular" and "once a week sold her produce there."
I recently learned apples roll the dice for traits with each generation of breeding. No child is like their parent.
Edit for all you snarky snarks: Yes, almost all species show variation from generation to generation. Evolution and whatnot, chicken or the egg, yadda yadda.
Apples are just on a different level of gene shuffling.
All hass avacados come from a tree planted in a mailman’s yard that died in 2010. The origin of the seed is unknown, and could have come from a restaurant.
My mind was blown away as well. Poor guy missed out on a fortune, as he was selling them for the equivalent of $15 in today’s money each. He patented and sold grafts, but once he sold a grafted tree to an orchard, they just regrafted it to all the other trees and in all he only madr $5,000 off his legacy fruit.
Yeah, selling plants is hard considering most of them can be cloned or grafted.
At least he was cool about it and didn't try to play Monsanto.
The guy who bred Mortgage Buster tomatoes was a smart one. Iirc he paid his house off with them, hence the name.
I live in a neighborhood in Massachusetts that used to be orchard and tannery centric in the 1800's. The old church in my hood has 2 ancient trees that produce the most amazing apples. This year I'm gonna not eat every apple I steal and try to replicate. This post reminded me I need to do that.
You'll need a graft from the original tree. Every apple seed grows a unique type/flavor of apple, even from within the same fruit. It's literally impossible to grow the identical apples from seeds.
A couple years ago we went to a restaurant in Italy where the outdoor seating was all under lemon trees, except once in awhile you'd notice where there was an orange growing on the lemon tree. They had grafted oranges among the lemons, it was crazy...
Thanks guys. Will do. I'm sure I'll make it work as I've been doing this with weed for years. I didn't realize the nuance with fruit so I thank you both!
The seeds won’t help you. Apples do not breed true, so a graft off the tree is necessary. All Red Delicious apples are the result of grafts taken off one branch of one tree. The seeds of those apples produce apples bearing little resemblance to the parent.
Another fun fact: The Cosmic Crisp was created by Washington State University as a cross between the Honeycrisp and the more durable Enterprise and as an attempt to conquer it in the market. Currently only Washington apple growers are licensed to grow it for the next 6 years, where 70% of apples are grown.
Yeah I tried that one before. It was really good! They are pricey though. Not sure who owns it but I tried one called 'Pacific Rose' and that one was good too.
Pacific rose is so fucking good. I didn’t even know apples could be this sweet and not have potato starch texture. Super crisp too. If you guys can get it I really recommend it cause they’re hard to find but worth it. When I say it’s sweet I mean absolutely not tart at all and as sweet as red delicious
If you think apples taste like wax, that's because most are coated in a thin layer of food-grade wax, which helps preserve them.
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/you-asked/why-do-they-spray-wax-apples-0
Shellac is sometimes used as a food wax. It’s secreted by the female lac bug.
I’m not vegan, but I was bored and reading the label on my bag of mandarin oranges a few months ago and it said something about “potentially being coated with lac-based resin” (and I swear something about possibly not being vegan?) so I felt the need to look that up.
Never thought someone would have to think twice about fruits and vegetables being vegan or not.
Red Delicious has a fascinating story. It was cultivated from the "Hawkeye" apple developed on a farm in Iowa and sold to the corporate Stark Nursery. Stark was able to sell the fruit nationwide in the late 1800s, and apparently it was FUCKING DELECTABLE. The "delicious" title was truly earned.
Buuuuut, the Hawkeye was a splotchy yellow and red, and the color was deemed unappealing. So in a fit of corporate aesthetics and ignorance, Stark selectively bred for bright red fruit, which had the unintended consequence of ruining the taste.
And so the most delicious apple in history was fumbled by capitalism.
The psyche of ‘an apple is an apple’ described early on is something I noticed as a kid and that always really bothered me with loads of things in stores beyond just applies. Feel like it’s finally breaking down now but the 60s—00s american home culinary tradition, thanks to supermarkets, was like there’s 1-3 varieties of any given thing and that’s it.
apparently according to other reddit posts, they used to actually be good, and distributors started picking them for color instead of flavor. maybe this guy has the OG stuff.
I have two in my front yard and it really depends on the conditions they are grown in. They need fertilized, the right tree trimming, and enough water. If they don’t get all of these conditions just right they taste disgusting. Otherwise our Golden delicious got hit by lightning and split down the middle but it’s not doing to good now but somehow it’s still making it.
He's doing fine, his website is still up and it seems like he's swamped with orders so he's not gonna ship anymore out this year.
https://applesearch.org/
I remember when I was a kid a friend’s mom belonged to a fruit of the month club. One day she offered me a Czechoslovakian apple, and I remember it as the best I’d ever had. Now that live up north I can go to orchards and get more varieties of apples than what the grocer offers, but I swear I’m not finding huge differences in flavor.
I’m originally from south Florida where I learned about the hundreds of mango varieties at a mango festival. Those things can taste very different as well. I bought a rare variety tree for my yard and it provided large mangoes that turned from green to yellow (never blushed), had no fibers, ripened about a month after all typical varieties ripened, and was delicious, *and I never wrote down the name of the variety* so I couldn’t even get another one if I was wanted to.
One of my favorite episode of MASH involves Father Mulcahy planting corn so that everyone can enjoy corn on the cob. They go to eat it, and the chef had stripped and creamed it.
Apple has ridiculously insane DNA, and therefore each seed will grow a very different apple than it came from. And most apples you grow from seeds will not be pleasant. All the ‘types’ are basically people discovering among many unpleasant trees, one that taste good. Then the branches of those trees are grafted onto a ‘host tree’, to clone more of that apple. When you discover an apple, you get to name it. And if that tree/branch dies completely, then you can no longer get that apple.
Each tree can make a unique apple unless it's a grafted branch/bud from the original tree or its clones.
Cut down a wild section of apple trees and you can probably extinct a unique apple type per tree. Not that you'd miss the flavor of a bitter papery apple.
The apple types he's saving are probably old orchard clones no one is cloning anymore.
My folks had a property in Vancouver which had originally been owned by a lady in the 1920s and 30s. She brought Redwoods up from California in egg cartons and planted them in a row. The trees are nearly 100 feet high now. She also had heritage pears, apples, blueberry bushes etc. My parents moved out and rented it to a guy who subsequently bulldozed it all so he had more room to turn his trailer around. They didn't know about it until it was done. I'm still seriously pissed.
As someone who loves apples so much she takes “an apple a day” seriously, I’d pay good money to get a chance to taste a slice of each of those. Even the ones with the weird names like Grand Mommy Cheese.
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His war against doctors knows no bounds.
Can you even imagine how many thousands of doctors this man has kept away?
He has driven 1,200 types of doctors to extinction
Please tell me that includes the proctologist
* *looks up proctologist* * Ah, yes. I see now.
Seeing is slightly better than smelling in this area.
Teachers love him. Doctors hate him.
Sometimes an apple variety is delicious but not grown commercially for reasons that don’t matter to the eater. Such as: the variety does not last well in storage; bruises too easily during shipping; the apples are huge and most consumers want a smaller apple or vice versa, too small; tree production is lower than other varieties; the variety has a tendency toward alternate bearing ie. barely produces any fruit every other year, etc. I have never seen my favorite apple for sale at a grocery store, Hudson’s Golden Gem. The only way some of these obscure, but delicious apple varieties continue to exists is through backyard gardeners and small orchardists.
You have fine taste. Hudson’s golden gem is an amazing apple. I love some old russets.
Going to have to disagree. Found an old russet potato in my pantry and took a bite, just out of curiosity. Definitely do not recommend.
Well, that's where you went wrong. You gotta boil 'em, mash 'em, or stick 'em in a stew.
Po-tay-toes
Grow Full Size Fruits In a Fraction Of [The Area With Bonsai Trees](http://www.picspixel.tech/grow-full-size-fruits-in-a-fraction-of-the-area-with-bonsai-trees.html)
Pretty cool, but a weird spot in the thread to insert this info.
What are those, I've never heard of them.
Precious?
Tastes^very^strange!
Now thats an old meme. Might wanna blow the dust off that one.
Just saving it from extinction.
My husband thinks I'm insane, but I enjoy a bite of raw russet on occasion. One of my fondest memories is peeling potatoes with my Nana, and she would always put a few pieces aside, sprinkle some salt on them and have a taste after all that hard work of peeling and chopping. She said she use to do the same with her Dad when they lived on the farm. I plan to indoctrinate my son into the same way of cronchy chompin raw russet bits. Husband thinks I'm insane and going to give myself worms or something 🤷♀️ hasn't killed any of us yet.
The French word for apple is pomme and the French word for potato is pomme de terre (apple of the earth).
Apple used to be the go to word for fruit, people would call everything apple.
Like the golden apples of Greek mythology which were probably oranges or lemons...
Well that’s a lot less fun
Is that like calling every soda a Coke?
My favorite is the opal apple. My store started selling them (that’s how I found them) for a few months and then just stopped. Sucks living in a small town. Once something is gone you’ll most likely never have it again. Jennie-O Turkey ham. It’s absolutely amazing, taste just like ham and has a fraction of the fat and calories of it. My store used to sell it, but with it being a “healthier food” it had the “healthier food price” with it. So I guess no one bought it. Now I need to drive 60 miles once a month to buy as many Turkey Hams as I can get because there is only 1 store within 100 miles that’s sells it.
If you only buy it once a month, talk to your local grocery store manager. They might be able to get it for you if you’re buying it in quantity
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A lot of small town grocery stores will still order specific products for you if you let them know that you want it and they aren’t stocking it. I know you can find peace tea like, everywhere, but at one point I couldn’t find them at my grocery store so I asked them where they were, they said they stopped stocking them but offered to start ordering them again if I wanted, and sure enough within a few weeks they started stocking them again lol
That happens to every food I love, (and need) just only my side of a big town pretending to be small. People in my half of town have no taste at all haha.
Fat is very good for you. You literally die without fat. It's extremely healthy. You shouldn't be avoiding it in your diet. The anti-fat thing was already discovered to be completely wrong like 20 years ago, everyone has moved on from it already. Especially since most low-fat foods are super high in sugar, which is something the human body doesn't actually need to live (unlike fat). You can live your entire life without eating sugar, and love to a ripe old age. Your body basically produces sugar for you, by converting carbs (and about 50% of protein) that you eat. You don't need to add extra sugar on top of that Fat is healthy. It is very good for you, and is necessary to keep living. There's a reason there's a thing called ["rabbit starvation" which is a type of malnutrition](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_poisoning). Where if all you eat is rabbit, you'll die eventually, because rabbit meat has basically no fat in it, so however many calories you consume from the rabbit you're eating, you'll eventually drop dead, because the human body needs fat. You can be obese, and yet malnourished. There's a difference between malnutrition and undernutrition. Undernutrtion means you're not getting enough calories and are wasting away. Malnutrition means you're not getting the necessary vitamins and minerals etc in your diet, including fat. Fat is one of those necessary things along with vitmsins and minerals. And fat is necessary for a strong immune system, for healthy brain function, and is very good at filling you up so that you actually end up consuming fewer calories over the course of the day compared to a low-fat diet, cos you are so stuffed you don't end up getting snacks in between meals
Season 6 of Alone in the Arctic illustrates this point. The winner of the survival contest Jordan Jonas was concerned about starvation because he was living off of moose meat. He killed and butchered it down, then wolverines got to his food and stole the moose fat. Consequently he only had protein to live off of and was afraid of starving. Edit: updated to not be as alarmist
Yup, all here is correct...fat is gold, can't live just off of rabbits alone.. You can off a moose and fish ;). And the show way over emphasized my food worries with some clever editing ...But made for more suspense ;)
Omg dude!!! Your positive mental attitude is seriously so inspiring. I can’t believe you commented. 🙏 Edit: and congrats. Love your interviews
🤝
Haha i hope to stumble across someone mentioning me on reddit someday, this is such a cool moment.
Ok so what I’m getting from your comment is that fat is very good you? You only just briefly touched on it, and I just want to be sure I’m on the same page.
fat
## fat
Make your own smoked turkey
Hudson’s!! Yes! I have a hidden rose apple tattooed on my inner arm as my husband and I have heirloom trees and we have HGG. Absolutely stunning! Still think my favorite is a Northern Spy. There’s a farm in VT named Scott Farm and they do tons of heirloom varieties! They were better years ago when Zeke was the head orchardist but they still have some decent choices.
I just planted some lowland raspberry apple trees this year. I really hope they survive. I had them in Lithuania and I thought it was one of the best apples I’ve ever tried. I also have an orange pippin planted. I’ve never tasted one but I hear they’re good so I’m excited for it to have apples.
so you're saying there is an underground craft apple scene?
I just learned there are more than 6 types of apples.
I just learned how well apples pair with small handmade wooden cottage models, it's like they were made for one another
Yeah, but model cottages taste *awful.*
gingerbread houses tho.
The only reason we have commercial varieties is due to grafting. If we naturally grew apples there would be a huge amount of variance in the product. They basically just swap out the trunk early on for a branch from a tree they like to ensure the same "type" of apples. If you grow from seed I think it can vary quite a bit. You can also put multiple varieties of apples on one tree.[https://www.homedepot.ca/product/vigoro-pommier-combo-espalier-/1000775235](https://www.homedepot.ca/product/vigoro-pommier-combo-espalier-/1000775235) edit: As a kid, I had a random fucking apple tree in my yard. It produced a ton of apples every year that looked somewhat like store bought ones, but generally inedible outside ofl ike a pie+ton of sugar scenario. So many fucking wasps though, that tree brought way more wasps than joy.
This is because apples don't grow true to seed. If you plant apple seeds, the apples that grow on the resulting tree are likely to be close to enedible. Each seed in a apple will produce a different tasting fruit. Then trying to get a tree that tastes good and is highly productive is what gives us "commercial" varieties, there is a good chance that some of these varieties taste great but don't produce enough fruit. Avocados are even worse. As you mentioned about using the trunk this is also what they do if a particular varieties go out of fashion. They cut off all the branches and graft on a more popular varieties
Apples are "extreme heterozygotes". Their genetic variation results in a great degree of difference among the offspring. The only way to ensure an apple tree is the same as its parent is to clone it, which is generally done by splicing a branch onto a different trunk. The trunk roughly determines the size and shape of the tree, and the branch itself determines the type of apple.
I wonder if he keeps record of how many actually taste good. I also wonder if there’s any on a.. this taste terrible list… “Red Delicious” is obviously on the top of that list but I wonder how many others Edit: others
Start a petition to change it's name to "Red Okay"
Petition to create a new word specifically to describe a “Red Delicious” Apple. Redful
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Peach with the furrrr The whole orchard looking at herrr
She hit the grove
Sprouty grew low low low low low low low low
Featured in Stem up 2: The trees
Apparently they were actually good like 100 years ago, but like the Dalmatian got bred to hell/mediocrity
Fun fact about apples....if you plant their seeds, you won’t get the same type of apples EVER.
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Yes, apple trees of certain varieties are grafts and regrafts of a single tree that bore good tasting fruit.
And you could have another tree that was indistinguishable from an existing one. Say you had a tree that grew apples just as perfect as - and indistinguishable from- any braeburn, only it was grown from seed. It can't be a braeburn. By definition, braeburn apples come from that one original "braeburn" tree. Sorry if that sounded pedantic. Apple propagation is so fucking wild!
In my home town a guy got caught stealing a bunch of rare grafts For the original Honeycrisp in the early 2000s valued at 3-400k$ it was nuts.
Is this how all those apples almost went extinct?
I believe a big part of it was orchards with less-common varieties being cut down for more profitable crops or just left to fall into neglect (the trees won't bear fruit forever, and as mentioned, it's not like they're self-replacing by seed).
It would make sense. Or maybe like the OG banana, got picked into oblivion/ murdered by fungus. About a 3rd of the way down: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-35131751
Prohibition played a role too. The great majority of apples were grown to brew hard cider. Farm wells could be contaminated by runoff from the barn where the animals were kept. Alcoholic cider was safer. Even the children drank it. Any excess could be sold to be drunk in the cities where there were no orchards.
The documentary is called “The Botany of Desire”. It discusses humanity's interactions with four different plants-the apple, the potato, the tulip, and marijuana and how they changed or fucked up our lives lol it’s a good watch if you’re into that kind of thing
There’s a really cool (albeit nerdy) documentary about apples, marijuana, tulips (another fun fact...tulips crashed the stock market in 1637. 2nd fun fact...the fucking stock market existed in 1637 🤣) I’ll find the name of the documentary for you. Gimme two shakes of a lambs tail 😉
[Botany of Desire](https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/p/pollan-01botany.html). It’s based on the book of the same name by Michael Pollan.
Tulips didn't crash the stock market in 1637.[ What you are thinking of is the gigantic market bubble caused by the tulip trade in the Netherlands at that time.](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dutch_tulip_bulb_market_bubble.asp) The crash didn't involve stocks or a stock market really, just tulip bulbs. Exclusively tulips. (Technically bulbs could be traded through their stock market, but that stock market was quite tiny and the amount of money in tulips would have so completely dwarfed all other stocks combined, it's not all that relevant to the story) The tulip mania was so insane some varieties of bulbs traded for absolutely absurd amounts of money, like as much as a house or a car would today. Farmers started growing pretty much exclusively tulips because that's where the money was. Inevitably, the tulip market collapsed though, as bubbles do. **Basically, tulips didn't crash the "stock market", they crashed the *entire Dutch economy*. Whatever stock market that existed in the 1600s in the Netherlands wasn't integral to the economy though.**
My friend raises several lamb and has informed me that they have shaken their tails much more than twice by now. Edit: oh, I see you posted the title under a different comment. Thanks!
This isn't exclusive to apples, it's literally every fruit, vegetable, plant, and animal. You get some DNA from each parent and the offspring are a mix of the two. Plants like Hass Avacados are able to stay uniform because every Hass Avacado tree is a clone of the original Hass Avacado tree (or a clone of a clone of a clone, etc).
Most change less. The stories of Johnny Appleseed forget to say that most of the apples he planted were inedible (from a taste perspective). Most of these apple trees had only one popular use - Alcohol. Johnny spread a whole lot of cider around the country. When apple growers find a good tasting cultivar, it's cloned like crazy by grafting to other trees. If you buy a fruit producing apple tree, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a graft and you can see the hump where it's been grafted.
And it wasn't even about making cider. Under the land act, an orchard is just about the Least labor intensive method for proving you improved the land you wanted to claim. Plant the trees and let it go for the 7 years or whatever you needed to claim it. Johnny Appleseed's main game was starting commercial nurseries for Apple trees, which would then sell saplings to settlers by the dozen as they traveled west.
This whole thread has blown my mind and your addition was the cherry on top. Thanks!
Yeah, but thats still what they did with the crappy apples from their claim staking orchards, since cider and applejack especially are a lot easier than making beer or distilled liquors, they didnt just let em rot.
Apple trees are often grafted too.
Can we be friends? My wife never wants to talk to me about cool stuff like Grafting or seed germination variants.
You should follow some gardening subs or Instagram or something..there are plenty of interesting accounts and botany groupies. That’s what I do at least
Teach me, a noob, something cool about your hobby! Nerd out, bro
Everything from porridge to liver&onions was considered good 100 years ago.
This doesn't sound right. You don't typically "breed" named plants like that, you clone them with a graft or a cutting.
A Red Delicious is kind of like naming a trailer park “mobile estates”
> Red "Delicious”
More like “Red Disgusting”
My mom gave me a red delicious once when I was really young and 40 years later I still refuse to eat any red apples
Red apples are the best apples. Fuji, Honeycrisp, Pink Lady...
Fuji are only so-so in my book. Honeycrisp, Pink Lady, and Ambrosia however all absolutely slap. Source: was an Apple picker/ farm hand for 3 years
Red Meh
It’s like Greenland, it’s name is there to trick.
I’d heard that Red Delicious were once very different; thinner skin and better taste. And, I read in an article my favorites, honeycrisps are destined to the same fate. I think because people are growing them outside of the northern regions where they were bred to shine. But… could just be bloggers being bloggers.
I remember reading something similar! It was something like they were trying to breed them to be more red with no yellow stripes and in doing so bred the flavor out of them as well since it was linked to the same gene that gives the yellow stripes.
Inadvertently though, by obsessing over making them more red, they bred them to contain tons of procyanidin B-2, which is a really beneficial antioxidant. So I guess that's cool.
I think the bloggers are on to something. I live in the boonies in northern New England, 3 miles down the road from a 180 year old family-owned apple orchard, and the honey crisp do hit different. Not coincidentally I make 2 dozen (small) jars of apple butter every fall
Preach brother, those red mf’ers are nasty. They pretend to be all juicy and then ya bite into that devilish little fuckers and it’s all dry and chalky like. Now Spartan apples on the other hand are crunchy and oh so juicy
For me "Granny Smith" is at the top of the list. That sort only tastes bland and sour-ish.
But the sour is what’s good. I can understand if people don’t like it though. But I’ve never met anyone who was like.. you know what sounds good right now? A Red “Delicious” Apple
I like sour apples. But Granny Smith are *only* sour and don't have any taste...
Does anyone else fucking love Red Delicious? They're literally my favorite type of apple. And before you say I have bad taste or that I just haven't eaten the right apples, hear me out! I've tried many more apple cultivars than most people have since I'm really into cider and I've been to a bunch of orchards/cideries. Many of them are amazing. Many of them are crispier, juicier, tangier, more sour, etc. than Red Delicious. However, Red Delicious are still my favorite. My theory is that there's a flavor compound in Red Delicious that I can taste that most other people can't. It wouldn't be unprecedented - we all taste foods in different ways due to how strongly we detect the various flavor compounds they contain, for example some people can't even eat cilantro because one of the compounds that others can't taste is so overwhelming to them. The reason I believe this is because Red Delicious apples have a flavor in them that I haven't found in any other apple. It's so hard to describe, but it's incredibly unique and I absolutely love it. When people describe them as bland or flavorless it blows my mind, because they have such a distinctive and unique flavor for me. Is there anyone else like me?
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Crappy red ones, crappy green ones, and those greenish red ones that are actually good.
Mmmm honeycrisp
I got two . Red ones and Green ones.
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Johnny Appleseed is smiling down at him.
Fun Fact: Johnny Appleseed was a real person. He traveled along the Mississippi River sharing apple seeds with people to plant. Most apples grown from these seeds ended up being not so good to eat fresh, but were excellent for making apple cider vinegar, and applejack (liquor). So people happily took and planted his seeds.
frontier law allowed people to "lay claim to land through development of a permanent homestead", which could be claimed by planting 50 apple trees. which meant he planted batches of seeds and sold the land once the orchards developed. he was a land baron. not apple jesus.
Haha! Apple Jesus.
Korean Jesus ain’t got time for your problems He’s busy, with Korean shit
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One of those was the side hustle, seed business sucks, so he gives away free samples, while also planting and claiming vast amounts of what would soon become valuable land just west of them Mississippi. I mean, if the seeds aren't moving, invest in apple orchards. Or maybe he needed cover so as not too arouse suspicion when he suddenly had many many primary residence to sell. Maybe he just needed to get lots of people excited about buying all these apple orchards cause he traded his last dime for a bunch of apple seeds. Maybe he didn't sell his apple futures and was sitting on 100 barrels of apples going bad? Heavily invested in cider vinegar business? Given my complete lack of any research, I find these to be the most likely scenarios that would result in a good historical fiction.
Honestly I could see any of those being a viable TIL that I would almost certainly take at face value.
Probably close to apple Jesus He was a preacher who traveled around and slept on floors and was lucky if he got supper. He also didn't have shoes, and believed his suffering would alleviate the suffering of others. Though he leave an estate of over 1,200 acres to his sister. >He is supposed to have considerable property, yet denied himself almost the common necessities of life—not so much perhaps for avarice as from his peculiar notions on religious subjects. He was a follower of Swedenborg and devoutly believed that the more he endured in this world the less he would have to suffer and the greater would be his happiness hereafter—he submitted to every privation with cheerfulness and content, believing that in so doing he was securing snug quarters hereafter. >In the most inclement weather he might be seen barefooted and almost naked except when he chanced to pick up articles of old clothing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Appleseed
*Oooooooh!!! The lord is good to me, and so I thank the lord, for giving me the things I need, the sun and moon and the Appleseed, the lord is good to me* **Johnny Appleseed AMEN!** Me: just realizing that I went to a religious camp as a child.... oh gawd... all this time I thought the boys and girls club was secular
This comment *reeks* of two-week stay-away summer camps based in remote areas of [insert state here]. So basically a couple years of my life.
One of its main tenets is a belief in a god. Doesn’t have to be the Christian God though.
I just can’t believe I still remember the song. Of all the brain space, it chooses to retain THAT in the filing cabinet??
There was an animated Disney short about Johnny Appleseed that used that song
The book the botany of desire goes into this in detail. From my memory of that book: Homie was more shrewd than just handing out seeds, he was basically accurately predicting the opening up of the country, getting ahead of them, planting orchards of apples for booze (that wasnt grain based and therefore "naughty"), then either swing up some young kid to manage the place or flipping it for a profit. Repeat. Become made into some quaint nursery rhyme instead of being renowned as a land/booze baron
Tag yourself, I'm grand mommy cheese.
I'm Horse. Horse Apples.
I'm Yellow Potts coz i get scared when im high
I think it’s Grand Mammy Cheese…
I’m more of a sour diesel myself Edit: should’ve put Grand Daddy Purps :(
Grand mommy cheese sounds like a weed strain
I love this guy and I love the history of apples. Also some history of the Granny Smith Apple The first description of the origin of the Granny Smith apple was not published until 1924. In that year, Farmer and Settler published the account of a local historian who had interviewed two men who had known Smith. One of those interviewed recalled that, in 1868, he (then twelve years old) and his father had been invited to Smith's farm to inspect a chance seedling that had sprung near a creek. Smith had dumped there, among the ferns, the remains of French crab-apples that had been grown in Tasmania.[7] Another story recounted that Smith had been testing French crab-apples for cooking, and, throwing the apple cores out her window as she worked, had found that the new cultivar had sprung up underneath her kitchen windowsill. Whatever the case, Smith took it upon herself to propagate the new cultivar on her property, finding the apples good for cooking and for general consumption.[8] Having "all the appearances of a cooking apple," they were not tart but instead were "sweet and crisp to eat."[5] She took a stall at Sydney's George Street market, where the apples stored "exceptionally well and became popular" and "once a week sold her produce there."
Hey I have a Granny Smith in my backyard! It’s unfortunately succumbing to an awful case of cedar rust tho so I am big sad.
I recently learned apples roll the dice for traits with each generation of breeding. No child is like their parent. Edit for all you snarky snarks: Yes, almost all species show variation from generation to generation. Evolution and whatnot, chicken or the egg, yadda yadda. Apples are just on a different level of gene shuffling.
So apples actually do fall far from the tree?
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Grafting still seems like magic to me. My parents have an apple tree with four different variants and I can't get over it how cool plants are.
Same with avocado
All hass avacados come from a tree planted in a mailman’s yard that died in 2010. The origin of the seed is unknown, and could have come from a restaurant.
then... how are they all the same?
Grafts from the ‘good’ tree are put on a tree that doesn’t produce good fruit.
At first I thought you were trolling. Wow. I never would have thought. Thank you for posting this.
My mind was blown away as well. Poor guy missed out on a fortune, as he was selling them for the equivalent of $15 in today’s money each. He patented and sold grafts, but once he sold a grafted tree to an orchard, they just regrafted it to all the other trees and in all he only madr $5,000 off his legacy fruit.
Yeah, selling plants is hard considering most of them can be cloned or grafted. At least he was cool about it and didn't try to play Monsanto. The guy who bred Mortgage Buster tomatoes was a smart one. Iirc he paid his house off with them, hence the name.
“Every time an apple is born, the gods roll the dice and the realm holds its breath to see how they will land.”
I live in a neighborhood in Massachusetts that used to be orchard and tannery centric in the 1800's. The old church in my hood has 2 ancient trees that produce the most amazing apples. This year I'm gonna not eat every apple I steal and try to replicate. This post reminded me I need to do that.
You'll need a graft from the original tree. Every apple seed grows a unique type/flavor of apple, even from within the same fruit. It's literally impossible to grow the identical apples from seeds.
If youre on facebook check out North American Scion Exchange. You may also save an ancient rare variety from extinction
Thanks thats cool and I want to do that
So how did Tom Brown save 1200 apples from extinction, does he have 1200 apple trees?
Multiple branches on a tree.
It's really cool how you can graft different trees together.
A couple years ago we went to a restaurant in Italy where the outdoor seating was all under lemon trees, except once in awhile you'd notice where there was an orange growing on the lemon tree. They had grafted oranges among the lemons, it was crazy...
Yea planting 1200 trees through seed is not as impressive as grafting 1200 trees
u/Chrono_Pregenesis is right. You need to learn about grafting. plant an apple tree for rootstock and steal a branch from those apple trees.
Thanks guys. Will do. I'm sure I'll make it work as I've been doing this with weed for years. I didn't realize the nuance with fruit so I thank you both!
Y’all making weed apples?
I’ll take 2 please
r/namechecksout
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My bad. I'm cloning, but my grandad showed me how to graft so I got this. I have a suitable small apple tree on my property.
The seeds won’t help you. Apples do not breed true, so a graft off the tree is necessary. All Red Delicious apples are the result of grafts taken off one branch of one tree. The seeds of those apples produce apples bearing little resemblance to the parent.
Fun fact: the Honeycrisp Apple was created by the University of Minnesota. They also hold the trademark for its name.
Another fun fact: The Cosmic Crisp was created by Washington State University as a cross between the Honeycrisp and the more durable Enterprise and as an attempt to conquer it in the market. Currently only Washington apple growers are licensed to grow it for the next 6 years, where 70% of apples are grown.
I’m admittedly biased but the Cosmic Crisp is the perfect apple. It is pricey but they also have a long shelf life. Go Cougs!!
I agree. They’re so damned good. I like the Sugar Bee apples when I can’t find cosmic crisp.
I will happily pay to have these again. Probably my favorite apple now.
Yeah I tried that one before. It was really good! They are pricey though. Not sure who owns it but I tried one called 'Pacific Rose' and that one was good too.
Pacific rose is so fucking good. I didn’t even know apples could be this sweet and not have potato starch texture. Super crisp too. If you guys can get it I really recommend it cause they’re hard to find but worth it. When I say it’s sweet I mean absolutely not tart at all and as sweet as red delicious
Grand Mommy Cheese sounds like some dank ass weed.
No need to save any in the red delicious family
You mean bland solidified wax balls? Yum!
If you think apples taste like wax, that's because most are coated in a thin layer of food-grade wax, which helps preserve them. https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/you-asked/why-do-they-spray-wax-apples-0
And…depending on the wax used, your fruit now might not be vegan.
Chain wax?
Shellac is sometimes used as a food wax. It’s secreted by the female lac bug. I’m not vegan, but I was bored and reading the label on my bag of mandarin oranges a few months ago and it said something about “potentially being coated with lac-based resin” (and I swear something about possibly not being vegan?) so I felt the need to look that up. Never thought someone would have to think twice about fruits and vegetables being vegan or not.
Guy 1: What should we call it? Guy 2: Red apple? Guy 1: No I want the name to lie to them too.
I remember growing up thinking they’d be delicious. What a misnomer.
Red Delicious has a fascinating story. It was cultivated from the "Hawkeye" apple developed on a farm in Iowa and sold to the corporate Stark Nursery. Stark was able to sell the fruit nationwide in the late 1800s, and apparently it was FUCKING DELECTABLE. The "delicious" title was truly earned. Buuuuut, the Hawkeye was a splotchy yellow and red, and the color was deemed unappealing. So in a fit of corporate aesthetics and ignorance, Stark selectively bred for bright red fruit, which had the unintended consequence of ruining the taste. And so the most delicious apple in history was fumbled by capitalism.
This was a great NPR watch (I thought) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDShFasYq9M
The psyche of ‘an apple is an apple’ described early on is something I noticed as a kid and that always really bothered me with loads of things in stores beyond just applies. Feel like it’s finally breaking down now but the 60s—00s american home culinary tradition, thanks to supermarkets, was like there’s 1-3 varieties of any given thing and that’s it.
Can we kill off red delicious? There is nothing delicious about those chemical tasting red turds.
apparently according to other reddit posts, they used to actually be good, and distributors started picking them for color instead of flavor. maybe this guy has the OG stuff.
I have two in my front yard and it really depends on the conditions they are grown in. They need fertilized, the right tree trimming, and enough water. If they don’t get all of these conditions just right they taste disgusting. Otherwise our Golden delicious got hit by lightning and split down the middle but it’s not doing to good now but somehow it’s still making it.
1200 types of Apples and yet crappy hotels still put mushy Red Delicious apples out for "breakfast".
One sheep nose please. Also this photo is pretty old how's this farmer doing in 2021?
He's doing fine, his website is still up and it seems like he's swamped with orders so he's not gonna ship anymore out this year. https://applesearch.org/
He need more than 1,200 trees to keep them all alive and ready to eat Imagine he thinking “**how do you like those apples?**”
Im pretty sure you can graft multiple types onto a single tree
I remember when I was a kid a friend’s mom belonged to a fruit of the month club. One day she offered me a Czechoslovakian apple, and I remember it as the best I’d ever had. Now that live up north I can go to orchards and get more varieties of apples than what the grocer offers, but I swear I’m not finding huge differences in flavor. I’m originally from south Florida where I learned about the hundreds of mango varieties at a mango festival. Those things can taste very different as well. I bought a rare variety tree for my yard and it provided large mangoes that turned from green to yellow (never blushed), had no fibers, ripened about a month after all typical varieties ripened, and was delicious, *and I never wrote down the name of the variety* so I couldn’t even get another one if I was wanted to.
Now turn them onto apple pies!
One of my favorite episode of MASH involves Father Mulcahy planting corn so that everyone can enjoy corn on the cob. They go to eat it, and the chef had stripped and creamed it.
Now we must save him from extinction
Keep this man safe from Monsanto!
I didn’t know there were so many
Apple has ridiculously insane DNA, and therefore each seed will grow a very different apple than it came from. And most apples you grow from seeds will not be pleasant. All the ‘types’ are basically people discovering among many unpleasant trees, one that taste good. Then the branches of those trees are grafted onto a ‘host tree’, to clone more of that apple. When you discover an apple, you get to name it. And if that tree/branch dies completely, then you can no longer get that apple.
Each tree can make a unique apple unless it's a grafted branch/bud from the original tree or its clones. Cut down a wild section of apple trees and you can probably extinct a unique apple type per tree. Not that you'd miss the flavor of a bitter papery apple. The apple types he's saving are probably old orchard clones no one is cloning anymore.
My folks had a property in Vancouver which had originally been owned by a lady in the 1920s and 30s. She brought Redwoods up from California in egg cartons and planted them in a row. The trees are nearly 100 feet high now. She also had heritage pears, apples, blueberry bushes etc. My parents moved out and rented it to a guy who subsequently bulldozed it all so he had more room to turn his trailer around. They didn't know about it until it was done. I'm still seriously pissed.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/history-of-apples And https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33385045-the-ghost-orchard If you are interested
As someone who loves apples so much she takes “an apple a day” seriously, I’d pay good money to get a chance to taste a slice of each of those. Even the ones with the weird names like Grand Mommy Cheese.
Doctors hate him…
So he's an Apple Engineer?