It is Decidedly Not
Delicious
The Red Delicious
apple, with its deceptive bright red hue and distinctive shape has been a
popular apple in America for 128 years. Most of us remember getting one on our
lunch trays in elementary school. But let’s face it, delicious it is not.
I love apples. I
have a special place in my world for each one. Each of them, but one.
As I child I was
not terribly picky about which apples I ate. My other classmates were though.
They would hand their apples off to me and I would eat them all on my walk home
at the end of the day. But the truly mealy, gritty ones—you know what I
mean—would never survive more than a bite before getting chucked into a bush
for the animals.
Unless it was February.
And winter. And I would eat the better bits around the mealy bits just for a
taste of the fruit.
I don’t feel so
bad for my great distaste for the red delicious. Even Tom Burford, author of Apples
of North America, whose ancestors planted seeds in the Blue Ridge Mountains
in 1713, and who grew up with over 100 species of apples in their family orchard
refers to the popularity of the Red Delicious as a “ramming down the throats of
American consumers this disgusting, red, beautiful fruit.”
Turns out, it
wasn’t always disgusting.
Colonial Apples
America had its
own native apples, but the common varieties we know today are descendants of
imports from Europe. Apples were important to colonial life. It was not only
used for food, but hard cider, a safe beverage to imbibe, as the village water
was usually unfit to drink.
Apples were one of
the earliest crops planted by colonists and each family would have a few trees
of their own in their backyards. In the 1800s and the early 1900s, the popular
apple was the Ben Davis, a reliable crop for growers. It was a pretty apple,
and a crop with a reliable yield, but touted to be pretty bland.
What Jesse Hiatt
Let Grow
A Quaker farmer
named Jesse Hiatt of Peru, Iowa found an unwanted apple tree growing within his
orchard of Yellow Bellflower trees, in the 1870s. He tried to cut it back for
several seasons but it came back up every year. History says that he decided
something that tenacious deserved a chance and he let it grow.
Ten years later the
tree produced its first fruit, a red and yellow striped elongated globe. The
flesh was said to be crisp, fruity and sweet, but it wasn’t pretty to look at.
Hiatt named the perfumed apple the Hawkeye, after his home state. Amy Traverso, author of The Apple
Lover’s Cookbook, says, “The [Hawkeye] was a chance seedling, and I like to
imagine what a revelation it was to come across this apple tree that you hadn’t
even planted. To taste the fruit for the first time and realize it was just
incredible.”
The Next Big Apple
The Ben Davis apple was
the widely-seeded but bland apple in production at the time. In 1983 the Stark
Brothers’ Nursery in Lousianna, Missouri, opened a contest to farmers, seeking
a new strain of apple. Jesse Hiatt brought his Hawkeye apple to the contest. It
was love at first bite and the Stark Brothers bought the production rights to
the apple.
The first thing they
did was change the name.
The First Delicious
It became the Stark
Delicious.
Rowan Jacobsen writes,
in Apples of Uncommon Character, that “the fruit kept well and had an
inoffensive, pleasantly aromatic taste. Most of all, it was very sweet. What it
wasn’t, was solid red; instead, it had a light pink blush, reddish stripes, and
a less pronounced strawberry shape, making it a pretty generic apple.”
Over the next twenty
years, the Nursery promoted the Stark Delicious in a manner that changed the business
of apple production. The Brothers spent $750,000, sending salesmen to farms all
over the country. They even sent it out as free gifts to their existing
customers and exhibited it at the 1904 World’s Fair.
The Stark Delicious
became a hit and the Nursery was bombarded with requests for more trees from
customers. As its population expanded, and it was propagated widely, it became
less and less like the original Hiatt’s Hawkeye.
What’s in a Name?
In 1914, when the
Golden Delicious was discovered in West Virginia and bought up by the Nursery,
the Stark Delicious apple became the Red Delicious. The Stark Brothers’
aggressive promotion of the breed meant that by 1922, the annual Delicious crop
was valued at $12 million.
A year later, one of
the Delicious growers in New Jersey found one single branch on one of his trees
that was producing a mutant variant of the apple. It had ripened earlier than
the others and had turned a deep, solid crimson hue. One of the Stark Brothers’
sons travelled from Missouri and bought the branch, also known as a sport, off
the tree for $6,000.
“Traditionally, growers
were paid based on the redness of the skin of their apples. Flavor was not
evaluated,” Rowan Jacobsen wrote. “Red Delicious earned a premium over other
apples, and the reddest Red Delicious earned the highest premium.” It wasn’t
long before farmers all over clambered to get their hands on their own clone of
the deep crimson variant.
Pros and Cons and Poor
Taste
Amy Traverson likens
this as the problem. “It turns out that a
lot of the genes that coded for the flavor-producing compounds were on the same
chromosomes as the genes for the yellow striped skin,” she explains, “so as you
favored the more consistently colored apples, you were essentially disfavoring
the same genes that coded for great flavor.”
This new breed of Red Delicious
came with a thicker skin that disguised the bruises that came during long
shipping routes. The “coke-bottle bottom” of the fruit and the uniform shape
made them perfect for storage and transport, prizing them for a long shelf life
over taste. The deep red fruits continued to ripen after harvesting, so it
could be picked prematurely and left to ripen in cold storage as it travelled.
As soon as an apple is
picked from the tree it begins to produce ethylene gas, which is what causes
fruit to either ripen or rot. According to Simon Thibault, author of Pantry
and Palate: Remembering and Rediscovering Acadian Food, it enabled the
Delicious apple to be stored for a length of time before being shipped.
Why So Popular?
The Red Delicious was
the most popular apple in production by the 1940s. But the skin was tougher
than other apple skin, hiding an open-celled texture that consumers would
consider mealy or gritty. It had a tough and bitter skin hiding mushy flesh.
Have you ever wondered why that is?
Thibault also says that
if the Red Delicious is left on the tree long enough, something called
watercore develops. “What that means is the starches and sugars get converted
to sorbitol, or unfermentable sugar. They’re very sweet, but they don’t last
long. If you let the Red Delicious do that, even the cardboard ones can become
nonoffensive.” But then their shelf life for transport is severely shortened. As
people left the farms and more people moved into the cities and shopped at
grocery markets, and they were not getting their food from the farm stands,
transportability became more important commercially.
By the 1980s,
seventy-five percent of the crops produced in Washington State were Red
Delicious apples. They are responsible for two-thirds of the apples produced in
America.
Who’s Buying Them?
Now, the majority of
Red Delicious apples are not bought by consumers. Instead they are sold to
schools and health centers, hospitals and hotels; places where people don’t
have a lot of choice in what they eat. For instance, the United States
Department of Agriculture sends the fruit out through its food distribution programs,
most of which comes from farmers’ surplus. The Red Delicious is usually one of
the last crops standing, as far as American demand goes.
Orchardists couldn’t
just switch out their long-standing crops and the seemingly sudden shift in
consumer demand took them by surprise. Tom Burford pointed out that people had
been “eating with their eyes and not their mouths.” Now shoppers were not
satisfied with poor flavor when there were other savory apples on the market
like SweeTango, Honeycrisp, Pink Lady, and Snap Dragon.
The Decline
Red Delicious apple
growers lost almost $800 million between 1997 and 2000 because consumers weren’t
buying them. In 2000 the government spent $138 million to bailout the apple farmers
of Washington state. It was the largest bailout in the history of the apple
industry.
Production of the Red
Delicious dropped forty percent over the next seventeen years. It is the parent
of the Empire and the Fuji apple varieties, among others. It’s still one of the
most commonly produced apples, by twenty million bushels, and in 2014, the
Washington Apple Commission began focusing on exporting two-thirds or more of
their Red Delicious crop to other countries. Most
of our Red Delicious apples wind up in China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi
Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.
(Did you know that China
produces a full half of the world’s apples, about eight times as much as the United
States. Seventy percent of the apples they grow are Fujis.)
A New Cream of the Crop
For the first time in
fifty years, the Red Delicious was dethroned by the juicy and mildly sweet Gala
in 2018. The Red Delicious came second—due to the production demand, Granny
Smith was third, Fuji fourth, and the Honeycrisp fifth… though if they were
correct, by the typing of this article the Honeycrisp should have moved up the
list.
Yum.
Lots of farmers are
slowly replacing their Red Delicious trees with new popular varieties and no
one is planting new ones. Somewhere out there, some farmers still grow the
original heirloom variety Hawkeye. Which means there is a chance to taste the
fruit that was the Red Delicious’ ancestor, and experience where its name
originated.
I sense a road trip in
my future.
Sourced with
information from:
A.C. Bright,
author of Apples Galore!
Tom Burford,
author of Apples of North America
Rowan Jacobsen,
author of Apples of Uncommon Character
Erika Janik, author of “Apple: A Global History”
Simon Thibault, author of Pantry and Palate:
Remembering and Rediscovering Acadian Food
Amy Traverso, author of The Apple
Lover’s Cookbook
LeAnn Zotta, author 200 Years and Growing:
The Story of Stark Bro’s Nurseries & Orchards Co
