Apple Review #23: Hunnyz

Grocery store apples are quite often shit. At best, they’re terribly boring, even if they’re not themselves terrible. Though we’ve left the Red Delicious Problem somewhat in our dust, the mass production and distribution of apples still pushes onto us an army of thick-skinned Honeycrisp taste-alikes. I had mentioned before but the last time I was at the store, most of the apples looked faintly withered, like your pruned fingertips after spending too long in the bath. I half-expected the apples to have gone pale, and to spy a small vampiric bunny hopping around the produce section.

Still, while there, I found a grocery apple that was new to me, and that apple was named — and I swear to Christ this is the name, I’m not making this up, this is not a bit — HUNNYZ. It’s called Hunnyz. Fucking Hunnyz.

We used to be a real country, goddamnit.

Hunnyz.

“Let’s misspell HONEY and stick a Z on its ass, that’ll fishhook the millennials into eating our stupid new Honeycrisp variant.” What is this, 2005? Is this what passes for edgy in the fruit-based marketing world? Was Honeycrisp too formal, too buttoned-up, too Earl Grey and scones and sconces and pinkies out, so they needed a COOL APPLE to SKATEBOARD IN and do a KICKFLIP in time with Smashmouth’s ALL-STAR? This is definitely the thing a guy in his early 60s names an apple because he wants to reconnect with his daughter who cut him out of his life because of his shitty politics, and now there’s his grandson, Mylar, and he only sees pictures of Mylar on Facebook but he wants to be in his life, so hey, maybe Mylar will think this apple is cool-as-heck, and the sweet HUNNYZ branding will rebuild the bridge and bring his family back together again, and if it doesn’t, that’s okay, eventually this fruit marketing executive will join the second Trump administration as Branding Consultant for ICE.

Or, put more succinctly, the apple has strong Poochie energy.

It’s a Honeycrisp – Crimson Crisp cross. Whatever. Who cares. I can’t believe I have to do this. Fuck it let’s eat this fucking apple.

(p.s., I took a photo of the apple, but somehow fucked it up and deleted the photo, so I took another one mid-bite, but that’s an awful photo, so the photo at the top of the post is I photo I took of oatmeal with apples, which is a good thing to eat, with or without a HINEYZ apple chunked into it)

My review of, and really I hate typing this, a Hunnyz apple, from the Giant grocery store chain in PA, late-October but honestly who knows when this fucking thing came off a tree, it could’ve been 2015:

I want you to imagine this review is mostly just me sighing a long sigh and kind of shrugging a bit and then mumbling a loose acquiescence, a shoulder-slumping resignation of mind, body and soul.

It’s not that this apple is terrible. It isn’t. It’s — it’s fine. It’s very sweet because of course American consumers are all viewed as children who need CANDY FRUIT or they’ll fucking riot, but it’s sweet without complexity — it’s not even the rich molasses of a brown sugar, it’s just rock candy but in apple form. It breaks hard, this apple, but not necessarily in a satisfying way: it’s like you’re biting into compressed styrofoam. It’s juicy as hell, which is nice. There is a tartness there, but it’s maybe, maybe at a 70/30 split with the sweetness, and that sweetness is so deeply straightforward. It’s a long, unswerving highway. It’s I-80 across Pennsylvania — it’ll get you there, but it ain’t gonna be exciting. It also has a long chew to it, partly due to the skin which wants to hang out with you like a weird guy at a party, but also because that hard-breaking texture means this turns into you eating dirt for a while.

It’s fine. I’m being meaner to it than it deserves. Honestly, if it didn’t have that name, I might rate is a 4.6, but as it stands, the name is an impasse for me, just a high ugly mountain peak I am unable to surmount, and this obstacle forces me to give this sweet crunchy sadlump a 3.9 out of 10.

Watch me eat this apple here, if you dare.

Hunnyz: Divorced dad energy

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