Apple Review #17: Red Delicious Double Feature

Palpatine voice: Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Delicious, the Red?

That’s right. We’re — er, we’re meaning I’m because you’re not here with me, it’s just an us in theory — reviewing the Red Delicious apple.

Not one apple.

But two of them.

The first, from a grocery store. The second, from a local orchard.

Yes, it’s quite possible I hate myself. I do it for you! For you, my dear sweet Apple Snack Gang. Never say I gave you nothing!

(By the way, would you wear an Apple Snack Gang t-shirt?)

First, though, it’s worth talking a little bit about why the Red Delicious sucks moist open ass. The Red Delicious was a popular, reportedly-once-tasty apple whose sport mutations were chosen to reproduce its beauty (meaning, how likely you were to choose it because ooh it so pretty, it so red) and its heartiness (meaning, how likely it was for the apple to survive transport to stores farther and farther from the tree it came from).

From this New England article:

‘“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,” Traverso explains, “so as you favored the more consistently colored apples, you were essentially disfavoring the same genes that coded for great flavor.”’

Which is to say, the Red Delicious is the original poster child for enshittification.

It’s not entirely fair to say capitalism destroyed this apple — some of it is literally due to the earlier challenges of getting food to places where it doesn’t necessarily grow. (Though even there, capitalism certainly has its teeth in — food deserts are often chokepoints caused by big corporations.) At the same time, the Stark Bros, who were not the original growers but who were the original marketers of the Red and Golden Delicious apples, were making money hand over fist promoting and selling these trees and their fruit. And hey, it really worked: the Red Delicious was the most popular apple in America all the way until the 2018 somefuckinghow, which explains why most people didn’t give half-a-shit about apples, because a lot of the time the apples they were getting in their school lunches or at a hotel buffet were these red, dead demon-lumps.

You couldn’t get rid of the things if you tried. They popped up everywhere.

Not unlike, apparently, the tree to start:

See, and if you’ll forgive me my own capitalist promotion here, one of the many seeds (ahem) that went into planting Black River Orchard was the fact that the original Red Delicious tree was a pernicious, persistent, pest-like intrusion. To quote the article above:

‘In the late 1880s, Iowa farmer Jesse Hiatt stumbled across a mystery apple seedling in his orchard. Despite his repeated attempts to stop the interloper from taking root, it continued to spring up year after year. Hiatt eventually gave up and dubbed the apple “Hawkeye” in honor of his home state.’

The Devil was clearly down there in the roots and the muck, pushing this demon tree up through the ground, reddening the apples with every mutation. EAT THE SHIT APPLES, the Devil cackled from down below.

And now we’re cursed with this fruit. Even still, one of the Top Five Apples in America. We cannot be rid of this damned spot.

You know, I almost called it ‘the McDonald’s hamburger of apples,’ but honestly, at least a McDonald’s hamburger tastes like something. The Red Delicious is what, then? The enshittified internet of apples? The LG microwave of apples? The retirement benefits of apples? Something that was maybe once good but has long since gone to shit because of unfettered unregulated money-grubbing greedfuckers?

Anyway. This apple has long plagued us. So let’s eat a couple, and see what happens, yeah?

My review of two Red Delicious apples, the first from Giant grocery store, the second from Coco’s farmstand, mid-Oct:

Look at that photo at the top. Or, if you want, watch the video where I eat both of these sonofaguns —

Actually, let’s get a little closer here:

Right out of the gate it’s easy to see that these are two fairly different apples — they’re different shapes, different colors, different beasts entirely.

(For reference, the one from the local orchard is on the right, the one from the grocery store is on the left.)

(I also like that in the photo at the top of the post, it looks like the apples are two buddies, sharing a look at the splendor of nature, each unaware that they are about to watch the other one be eaten by a bearded giant.)

On the right, the local Red Delicious has brighter lenticels in a larger starfield of them. It’s shorter and squatter, too, and has more actual green and yellow in it. The grocery store apple on the left is more what I’m used to with a Red Delicious — taller, broader shoulders, a deeper Merlot red, Homer’s winedark sea, all empurpled and shit. It’s more classic.

But hey, beyond that, the important thing is, how did they taste?

Well, Bob, they tasted like nothing.

Mostly nothing, anyway, and when they did taste like something, it was mostly shit. Sad, wet shit. These are the apples of depression. They taste like depression. They are woe-based fruits — fruits born in some soggy lightless bog, the kind of place your mind wanders to when you’re in the existential grip of the deepest, emptiest abjection. Bleak. Cheerless. A void.

But, we should be more granular.

The shared traits between the apples are these:

The skin, for an apple that is reportedly hearty-and-hale, was thinner than expected. Like a mere insult could pierce it.

The taste in each came with a lot of juice, but mostly as if that juice were water someone pumped into the apple to make them plumper, as one might do to a chicken. It was apple-scented, apple-tinged liquid, as if someone whispered the word apple over a glass of tap water.

Neither had much of an odor beyond “Elmer’s glue.” It was evocative of that — a child’s glue, a glue stick, paste. That kind of thing.

Both finished their speed-run through my mouth with considerable bitterness. Not a nice bitterness. Not a Campari kick. More like you were licking pennies or sucking on driveway gravel.

Where they diverged, beyond appearance:

The local orchard apple had more upfront sweetness, but again, when I say sweetness, I mean a pale horse of it — it was like having a sweet drink that had all the ice melt in it and then you drink the ice melt and you can still identify the ghost of sweetness in there, but it is no longer a living presence.

The grocery store apple arguably had more flavor as I ate the rest of it — and arguably the more interesting flavor, but I say interesting in the way of the old Chinese curse, may you live in interesting times. It was interesting in the way it’s interesting when the Dave Matthews band tour bus accidentally dumped 800 pounds of shit and piss all over a sightseeing tourist boat in Chicago. It’s interesting, but that doesn’t mean it was good. The flavors were really quite odd — so odd I don’t even know how to quantify them. It felt like my tongue, in its effort to decipher these flavors, was trying to do the gymnastic act of solving a Rubik’s Cube in my mouth, except the Rubik’s Cube was made of all of the old stuff you pulled from the back of my refrigerator. “Is that the taste of a honeydew melon rubbed with the grease of old baloney? Is that a soupçon of Windex sprayed over the patina of autumnal grasses, grasses grown dusty with the mold of a fading season, crusted with uncollected pollen and probably also microplastics?” It was weird and bad.

Only bonus is, the weird-bad taste went away fast, once again leaving —

Nothing.

Texturally, the orchard apple was crisper, juicier. The grocery store apple had a deeper bite to it, but also felt old and withered in the mouth.

Neither of these were good.

It’s not exactly that either were heinous abominations cast upon the earth by a cruel and merciless God who felt that the Deluge was not enough punishment for us, no. Honestly, that would be more interesting. The greatest crime these apples offer is that the Red Delicious is not merely a liar, but rather, a dullard. It’s an empty promise, an insipid, wearying fruit — it’s the psychic vampire of apples, the Colin Robinson, your absolute worst co-worker, the slowest guy on the road when you’re trying to get somewhere, a button that doesn’t do what you want it to do no matter how often you push it. It’s just… nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing good. Nothing particularly bad. Just a great big nada, naught, nichts, zip.

If I had to compliment them, I would simply say they were refreshing. In the sense that they were juicy and watery and were I thirsty, I’d be a bit quenched. I’d hate myself. But I’d be quenched.

I’m going to collectively give these two a 1.3 out of 10, just because I’m mad at how booooooring they are. The orchard one was better.

Red Delicious: Pathetic red sacks of flavorless spit

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