Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds

To talk about this apple, we first talk about other apples.

Let’s talk about the Black Diamond apple, because I get sent this every once in a while — a meme goes around, like this one —

Or this right here —

And everyone goes ooh and ahhh and they’re like WOW BLACK APPLES HOLY CRAP, THESE ARE CLEARLY THE DEVIL’S APPLES, I WANT SOME, but I think there’s a few things to note here.

First, shit you see on the Internet is and has often been bullshit, and that was true before AI got its uncanny fangs into our online realities, and at this point you should be increasingly skeptical of most things you read — honestly, I might not even be real. I’m doubting my own existence!

Second, usually things that sound too good or too extreme to be true often are too good or too extreme to be true, because few things are that good or that extreme. Most things are in the bell of the curve, not the edges.

Third, things that seem designed to be spread — to be memeified, or to go viral — are also often, say it with me, bullshit. If it’s a short punchy piece of cool information in a neat little square, it wants to be shared — or more to the point, it means someone wants you to share it. They want you to fertilize the world with horseshit.

(It’s why right now you can go on Facebook and see shitloads of people — of all ages, amongst people you certainly know and trust — spreading unsourced unlinked things with obviously-AI images, because these things make them feel good, or feel mad, or feel wonder, or feel something anything at all. Never mind the fact that it’s very easy to check the reality of the claims they’re reposting — even with enshittified Google. Never mind that when you tell them it’s AI, they’re like, “that’s okay, because I like it anyway.”)

So, then, the Black Diamond apples.

That meme above isn’t the only one I get — sometimes it’s other photos, sometimes it notes that these are like, sacred apples grown in Tibet and they were found in the Buddha’s own peaceful armpits or what-not and they are so healthy they’re basically magic they cure bad skin bad hair bad breath bad cancer — aaaaand you know, this just isn’t reality, as far as I can tell.

It seems like:

a) the Black Diamond is a real apple

b) it’s just a normal, maybe not even that great, apple, very reddish-purple, still cool, not black, designed more to be delightful in a gift box than in the mouth, and potentially Photoshopped to look darker and more impressive

(I’ve seen them compared to Red Delicious apples, soooooo. Yeah.)

(If you want some inside baseball chatter about it — this thread, here.)

The funny thing is, we actually have apples right here that tend to grow pretty dark. This is just a regular-ass Red Delicious I bought some years ago at a grocery store — it’s not black, but it’s definitely the color of, um, a blood-spattered ruby slipper, wouldn’t you say?

The photo at the fore of this post is the subject of this review, the Black Oxford — and I took a shot from another angle, and you can see from that angle the purpleyness (not a word) is heightened —

Or there’s the Arkansas Black, as well. I’m sure there are others, to boot. Heck, the Blue Pearmain — which I regrettably did not get any of this season! — literally has a blue hue to it due to the dusty blueish bloom upon its skin. (I’ve no idea what that “bloom” is — if anybody knows, drop a comment.)

Anyway — case in point, the Internet is often full of shit, but also, there’s often actual true things that are just as cool as the bullshit you find online.

All that being said? Let’s review this fuckin’ apple.

My review of a Scott Farm (VT) Black Oxford apple, early-Nov:

This apple is a lightless void. Its skin is the Homeric winedark sea, and its flesh is as dense as a collapsed star. It’s a heavy apple. You could knock a toddler’s head off with this thing. I mean, don’t! Don’t do that! But you could.

The skin is somewhat forbidding, but not terribly so. The flesh really is dense, which lends itself to a diligent chew — you’re gonna have to CHAW down on this thing, so if your CHOMPERS ARE WEAK, this apple is going to tell you to get fucked. No sad soft teeth for this apple. You gotta have a rock-tumbler mouth to eat this apple proper-like.

The taste is —

Honestly, it’s pretty wild.

It’s more sweet than tart, but there’s a tart tang in there. I think the sweetness, though, gets pretty interesting — my first thought was, “This tastes like black cherry soda,” and then my second thought was, “That’s wrong, this tastes like Dr. Pepper.” And it does. The herbaceous-spice vanilla prune cherry captured-ghost corn syrup weirdness of DOC PEP is in the flesh of this apple.

There is a darkness in the heart of this apple, but the darkness is not Satanic or Luciferan — it is not there to buy your soul at a crossroads at midnight, nay. The darkness is the darkness of the night sky, the darkness of reduced cherry juice, the darkness of a ruby Port.

Maybe only one or two demons in there.

It’s nice. It’s pretty. It’s tasty. Go get one.

I feel like we can call this a solid 8.2 outta 10.

I eat it here. Wendigo mukbang, baby.

Black Oxford: Cheerful Goth kid who loves Dr. Pepper

Reviews in 2025: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz, Winesap, Stayman Winesap, Winter Banana, Ribston Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Roxbury Russet, Opal, Cosmic Crisp

You may have heard the news — and if not, you may have felt it in your bones, a paroxysm of worry squirming in your marrow like worms — that Kraft put out an apple pie mac and cheese. And of course, for those who somehow don’t know, I’m the Chief Captain Scout Leader, aka, The Apple Man, of the Apple Snack Gang, whereupon I eat apples and apple-related things and then post about them here and on Instagram. So it was of course grotesque kismet that I would end up eating this fucking thing in front of you, digitally, so to speak.

Food Crime Mukbang, baby.

I have done this in a two part video, if you wanna watch —

Part One

Part Two

— but if you’re one of those weirdos who, you know, still reads things, I note first that a) bless you and b) you can just read what I’m about to write.

My review of this shit is this:

It smelled fairly strongly of apple pie spice, but not apple pie. I am of the mind that many apple-flavored things are apple-flavored in the same way that pumpkin spice is a thing — the apple-flavor contains no apple, the pumpkin spice contains no pumpkin. They’re just flavored with their respective spice blends, and those blends are honestly pretty similar. The smell coming off this Kraft mac was cinnamon and nutmeg-forward, with zero apple anything.

Oh, and it smelled a little barfy.

Not hella-barfy!

But a little barfy, like how some products cooked in coconut oil smell or taste that way after they sit too long. (Rancidity, man. Rancidity.)

I ate it.

And it was–

Okay, listen, I expected it was going to go one of two ways. The first was that it was going to be an absolute atrocity inside my mouth, a food crime punishable by exile in a cosmic prison beyond the veil of space and the walls of time — a spoonful of nightmare. Or, alternatively, that it was going to be really fucking dull.

I would’ve preferred the Mouth Atrocity.

Unfortunately, I got Fucking Dull.

It was boring!

The potpourri smell mostly disappears into the food. It gives only a faint hint of autumnal spice in the mac and chee, which is, y’know, fine. It’s nothing to hurk up, it’s nothing to cheer about. It’s just food. In your mouth.

(It must be noted that one of the things Kraft gets right, always, about their mac and chee — those soft little noodle-tubes are deeply, deeply comforting. Texturally they’re a wonder — barely any texture at all, just a soft, acquiescent bundle of not-quite-goo in your mouth, less pasta and more those wiggly tube things you’d win at an arcade, the ones that look like water-filled double-anuses and you let them slip and slide in your hand? You know what I mean? You know what I mean. Anyway, point is: you barely even need to chew Kraft mac and cheese. It’s present! You can tell it’s there. But it begs little of you. It asks almost nothing, demands no work, and loves you for who you are.)

So, this was completely unexceptional and uninteresting in every way.

But I really wanted to try to get closer to… well, what it said on the box. APPLE PIE. Like, where’s the crime part of this food crime? I wanted to at least get closer to the intent of the thing.

As such, I got out my applesauce.

I make a pretty solid applesauce — it’s easy, and delicious, and here’s how you do it: chop up as many apples as you want. Keep the skins on maybe half of them? Only red ones. You want that red, rosy color. Pour some apple cider (non-alc) over them, ideally something from a local orchard or farm. Like, a half-cup, maybe a cup if you’re cooking a bunch of apples.

Simmer, cover for 20 minutes until apples are mushy.

Blend them up — you can just mash, but in that case, peel all the skins to start.

Then return the apple goo, now blended, to the pot, and now add:

Cinnamon, nutmeg. Cinnamon to taste, nutmeg just a heavy pinch.

Cook on low for another… at least 20 minutes, maybe 30, maybe more. Stir semi-often. I cover the pot back up for the first part of this but then leave uncovered for most of the time.

It reduces down to this delicious goo. It’s shy of apple butter — but has a velvety texture, and you’ve added no additional sugar.

Anyway.

I took a heaping spoonful of my applesauce —

And plopped it into the mac and cheese.

Mixy-mixy.

Then I ate it.

And — no food crime here, my friends. ONLY FOOD MIRACLE. Holy fuck it was tasty. You know how sometimes when you were a kid (or an adult still shut up) and you squirt ketchup into pasta or mac and cheese and you’re like “This is gross but also amazing?” This is that. It’s maybe gross, I dunno, but it was super tasty. It added this sweet-tart appley snap to the mac and cheese and upped the comfort level, upped the nostalgia level, and gave it an actual apple pie vibe.

So, do that.

And in fact, turns out this is a thing — älplermagronen is a Swiss-German dish where mac and cheese (tubule mac and cheese too) is paired with, often, bacon, onion, and potato and then on the side you get applesauce or apple compote to mix in for taste. Warm and comforting and yum.

Anyway.

To sum up:

I ate the food crime and it wasn’t much of a food crime but then I made it into a food crime that simply corrected the injustice of boring food, the end.

This is the apple in your hand.

Some would say it is so red that it looks black, but that’s not quite
right. It’s the color of wine and offal, of liver soaked in Pinot Noir.
Bruise-dark and blood-bright.

The skin shows little russeting, if any. But it is home to a peppering
of lenticels—the little white dots you sometimes see on appleskin. These
lenticels feel somehow deeper than the skin itself. As if you are staring
into a thing that is nothing as much as it is something: an object of depth,
of breadth, like a hole in the universe. In this way the lenticels are like
the stars of a moonless evening.

The skin is smooth and cold, always cold. It is a round apple, not
oblong, not tall, but also not squat. The Platonic ideal of an apple shape,
perhaps: roughly symmetrical, broad in the shoulders, narrow toward
the calyx. The apple is heavy, too. Dense-feeling. Heavy enough to crack
a window. Or break a nose.

Even before you bite it, a scent rises to meet you. It’s the smell of
roses—not unusual, because apples are related to the rose. Same family,
in fact: Rosaceae.

What is unusual is the moment, a moment so fast you will disregard
it, when the smell makes you feel something in the space between your
heart and your stomach: a feeling of giddiness and loss in equal measure.
In that feeling is the dying of summer, the rise of fall, the coming of winter, and threaded throughout, a season of funerals and flowers left on a grave. But again, that moment is so fast, you cannot hold on to it. It is
gone, like a dream upon waking.

Of course, what matters most is the eating.

In the first bite, the skin pops under your teeth—the same pop you’d
feel biting into a tightly skinned sausage. The flesh has a hard texture,
and if you were to cut a slice you’d find it would not bend, but rather, it would break like a chip of slate snapping in half. That snap is a satisfying
sensation: a tiny tectonic reverberation felt all the way to the elbow.
In the chew, the apple is crisp, resistant to its destruction, with a
crunch so pleasurable it lights up some long-hidden atavistic artifact in
your brain, a part that eons ago took great joy from crushing small bones
between your teeth. The flesh is juicy; it floods the mouth, refusing to be
dammed by teeth or lips, inevitably dripping from your chin. But for all
its juiciness, too, the tannins are high—and the apple feels like it’s wicking the moisture out of your mouth, as if it’s taking something from you
even as you take from it.

The taste itself is a near-perfect balance of tartness and sweetness—
that sour, tongue-scrubbing feel of a pineapple, but one that has first
been run through a trench of warm honey. The skin, on the other hand,
is quite bitter, but there’s something to that, too. The way it competes
with the tart and the sweet. The way the most popular perfumes are
ones that contain unpleasant, foul odors secreted away: aromatics of rot,
bile, rancid fat, bestial musk, an ancient, compelling foulness from the
faraway time when crunching those little bones made us so very happy.

And so very powerful.

The bitterness of the skin is a necessary acrimony: a reminder that
nothing good can last, that things die, that the light we make leaves us all
eventually. That the light leaves the world. A hole in the universe. So we
must shine as brightly as we can, while we can.

It speaks to you, this bitterness, this foulness.

It speaks to some part of you that likes it.

Because part of you does like it.

Doesn’t it?

---

Okay, this isn’t really an apple review, ha ha I tricked you because it’s Halloween, you sickos. Rather, a note that Black River Orchard is two bucks for your digital book reader of choice. Which is to say, you can find it at Bookshop.org, Kobo, Amazon, B&N, Apple, and so forth.

And The Book of Accidents is still five bucks.

I expect this is a today only thing, so hop to it. If you dare.

HAPPY APPLEWEEN, NERDS

Gotta chase that sweet, sweet Honeycrisp dragon — that’s the thing, right? So many of our grocery store apples are, at this point, chasing the success and the flavor of the vaunted and beloved Honeycrisp apple. They want that honeyed sweetness with the big crispness and the epic juice and, at the end of the day, if that comes in an apple that’s easier to grow and easier to transport, so be it. (Doubly so if it’s an apple they can control better in terms of who can sell it, grow it, distribute it.)

Enter: the Cosmic Crisp.

It is, itself, a Honeycrisp x Enterprise collab — it’s hardier than the Honeycrisp, and arguably crunchier and juicier at the same time. It can only, only be grown in Washington state — er, also, Chile, apparently? — and has actually led to instances of apple piracy, with people stealing trees to plant in other states. And if you read that link, you’ll further see what a massive fucktangle you get looking at Big Agriculture — these are not small, scrappy entities. You’ll see private equity in there. You’ll see names like Goldman-Sachs, Bill Gates, Harvard University in there. I think like with so many things inside our capitalist nightmare, at the ground level of these monster-sized corporate entities you have people who genuinely care about both the individual product and the category of products — meaning, people who care very much about their apple, but also, apples in general. But then as you go up the chain, interest in the product is superseded by interest in money. The product is just a chit, a marker, a physical representation of investment and profit, a money tulpa. Doesn’t matter what the widget or dongle is; as long as it conveys cash, it’s interesting to them for that singular characteristic. And that’s a bummer. Money is a bummer. I’m not saying I hate people getting paid for cool things, but when you leap containment and that thing just becomes a wealth amulet, you know you’re in dicey territory. And with apples…

I mean, do we need to re-do the Red Delicious lesson?

Or the encroaching Honeycrispocalypse?

(It’s kind of like publishing. The people I know in publishing are nearly all amazing, thoughtful, fascinating people who care very much about books and writers. The publishing industry, meaning the giant ever-shifting architecture around and above them, is also controlled by people, many of whom don’t probably give one sticky fuck about books or authors — and it’s enough that this mechanized architecture becomes ultimately faceless and profit-driven. And so the industry stops caring about individual books and more about TRENDS and COOL GENRES and POPULAR TROPES and it aims for them even if that’s… the equivalent of overplanting Honeycrisp or breeding Red Delicious until it’s very red, but not very delicious.)

(Sorry, little bitta inside baseball there.)

So — the Cosmic Crisp.

It’s viewed by some as the heir to the Honeycrisp throne. And I’ve liked it quite a lot in the past. How did it hold up this time? Did it win my heart? Did it win my mind? Have I formed a sinister cult around it?? AM I IN THE CORNER, GIBBERING ITS NAME OVER AND OVER AGAIN?

My review of the Cosmic Crisp from Giant grocery store, PA, late-Oct:

Well, shit.

That’s the review.

Well, shit.

To unpack this a bit:

This wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be!

The positive: probably the juiciest apple I’ve yet eaten this season, maybe ever. You can watch the video here and honestly, it gets pornographic how the juice floods out of the apple. And it was lovely juice. It’d be wise to buy a batch of these and just juice them to drink — it would be phenomenal.

That said… you know, the rest wasn’t as good.

The crunch was nice! It’s a good crisp, breaking apple. Honestly better cut into slices you can break them like pieces of slate — biting into it outright is not as pleasing. The flavor, well. Well. It was fine? It’s fairly straight-down-the-middle with the one notable complexity being: redolent with rose. And that is not one of my favorite apple flavors. It tastes like grandma perfume a little. And I don’t want my apple-eating experience to be in any way reminiscent of macking on someone’s Gamgam, you know?

Leave GamGam outta this.

So, it’s floral, but not a floral I like.

This is not the Cosmic Crisp I’m used to. Now, I’m willing to believe this was simply not the best example sample of a Cosmic Crisp apple — after all, the one I had was beat-to-shit. It looked like it had been shanked in apple prison. Someone slashed it with a shiv made from apple seeds or something. It was a rough customer, and so that is indicative that maybe it’s not the best version of this apple at the outset, and that maybe translates to lesser flavor.

Still, what a bummer.

As such, I can’t rank this higher than the Honeycrisp, and if I’m being honest, I can’t even rank it as high as the Honeycrisp. I know! I know. To be honest, if it weren’t for the absolutely lovely flood of cidery juice this thing purged from its cells, it might’ve even ranked lower.

I’ll try to eat another before the season is over and add to the review.

But for now?

Can’t go higher than 6.7 out of 10.

GO ON, GEN ALPHA, HAVE YOUR WAY WITH IT. SAY YOUR LITTLE CATCHPHRASE. DO YOUR LITTLE GESTURE.

In the meantime, the Opal holds the “best grocery store apple” award this season.

Cosmic Crisp: So far, not out of this world, but rather, very much of this world, probably somewhere not that awesome like Scranton, PA or Ohio, even though it was grown in Washington state, or maybe Chile

Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz, Winesap, Stayman Winesap, Winter Banana, Ribston Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Roxbury Russet, Opal

I don’t care much for grocery store apples, but I do love me a good grocery store. I recall in reading White Noise way back in the day, that Don DeLillo captured the sort of overwhelming sensory assault from the grocery store — but also the comfort of it, the almost psychospiritual vibe of it. You walk down the aisles and it feels like you’re traveling a corridor of video-game colors — bright Atari shit in every direction, food in requisite Minecraft blocks, branding ranging from old-timey classics to new postmodern on-trend dystopian surreality. It’s glorious and disorienting and frustrating and I really do enjoy the grocery store experience just for how powerful and deranged it feels. WELCOME TO THE HALL OF FOOD SCIENCE. BEHOLD THE COLORS. TASTE THE SALT AND THE SUGARS. THIS AISLE IS HEALTH! THIS AISLE IS CAVITIES! EAT THE TIDEPODS AND WASH THE PIZZAS, ROLL IN THE MEAT, DRINK THE FIZZY DRINKS, WAKE UP, DON’T MIND THE SHRINKFLATION — SNACKTOWN AWAITS.

Of course, the produce section is often a bit less exciting — though a good produce section is a thing to behold, too. Humid and rainforesty, bright greens and oranges and reds. Shelves flush with lush vegetation. The gleam of the peppers, the feel of the yams, and of course the shine of the apples.

I did just come back from a grocery store and it was… less this, at least in the produce section. Everything looked rough — browned at the edges, antiqued with the sepia of time and decay. It was not a good situation. Maybe we disappeared the people who pick the produce. America, I guess, in 2025.

To circle back around, there are few grocery store apples I tend to like — most are too sweet or too old and shitty to regard as anything but a thing to hurl at a bear in the hopes it stops chasing you. But there are two I liked in the past, and so it’s a good time to revisit those today — and first up of those two?

The Opal.

My review of an Opal from (shudder) Walmart, late-Oct:

Here’s what I want you to imagine —

I want you to imagine fruit punch.

It’s red, right? So no, not that fruit punch. Instead, let’s imagine we blended together pretty much all the fruits that are orange and yellow. I’m talking, what? Pineapple. Pear. Orange. Lemon. Passion fruit because, okay, it’s purple on the outside I think but it’s got orange goop innards. Blend those fruits together, and that, to me, was the experience of the Opal apple.

Which is to say, I actually really liked it. It’s got good crunch, good juice, probably a 60/40 split on sweetness to tartness. It is, like its exterior, a sunny apple. It wants you to like it. It wants to be liked. It hopes you’ll vote for it for Prom Queen, or Most Likely To Be The Bestest Apple Ever, or for President of The United Stems of Applemerica. I don’t know that it deserves all those kudos and plaudits, but you know, it’s a truly pleasant apple. If I had a complaint, it’s that maybe some of its similar-looking cohorts in the apple world tend to offer a kind of lip-slicking or even buzzy lemon-lime tartness on the lips, and this falls just short of that.

And the texture is good but not great — it’s got just a few extra seconds on the clock, taking it into too much chew territory.

Still, I love this apple. Good apple, maybe even a great apple.

I feel like this is going to get an 8.0 out of 10 from me. Question is, my other favorite grocery store apple is the Cosmic Crisp —

Will it beat it?

Stay tuned, apple dorks. We shall see. We shall see.

Video of me chomping down here.

Opal: A sunny happy-go-lucky gee-shucks gee-whiz gosh-darn fruit-punchy-but-with-all-the-orange-yellow-fruits apple

Reviews so far this year: Honeycrisp, Sweetie, Crimson Crisp, Knobbed Russet, Cortland, Maiden’s Blush, Cox’s Orange Pippin, Reine des Reinettes, Ingrid Marie, Hudson’s Golden Gem, Holstein, Suncrisp, Ashmead’s Kernel, Opalescent, Orleans Reinette, Black Gilliflower, Red Delicious Double Feature, Jonathan, Ruby Mac, Crimson Topaz, Esopus Spitzenburg, Mutsu, Hunnyz, Winesap, Stayman Winesap, Winter Banana, Ribston Pippin, Rhode Island Greening, Roxbury Russet