Apple Review #41: Wild Twist

BEHOLD: A WILD (twist) APPLE APPEARS. But first: a brief digression about agricultural-industrial apple storage!

Did you know that the reason we get apples (and ostensibly a lot of other fruits and veggies) year-round, way outside their harvest period, is thanks to the magic of industrial agriculture? An apple gets picked and then is preserved in its current state through magic, which is to say the apple is fixed by the gaze of a merciless god, placed upon an accursed altar made of wyvern bones rimed with hoarfrost, and then insulted endlessly by a gamboling satyr-like figure known as the Apple Jimby, and it is these wicked insults and cursed configuration that keeps an apple fixed supernaturally in the state where it can still be eaten fresh months later.

*receives a note*

Okay never mind, it’s apparently something called “science” where they put the apples in “controlled atmosphere” (CA) storage rooms, where the apples are “put to sleep” by “gases” and “temperature.” Whatever. I was told it was the god and the Apple Jimby wyvern insult thing.

You can read about apple storage here. It’s actually fairly neat — and also interesting that each apple can’t just be stored the same way as the apple next door to it. They are each precious apple snowflakes and must be tamed and pleased according to their capricious apple whims.

I’m also to understand that the way apples truly lose their character is not in this storage but rather, once they’re out of it — taken out of controlled storage, loaded onto trucks or trains or, I like to assume, an army of Big Ag Hovercrafts, left in grocery store bins for far too long. And that’s where apples get old and weird and lose the thing that makes them what they are, and it’s why you end up with mushy, meh, mediocre lumps — the ghost of good fruit rather than good fruit itself.

All right. Onto the review.

My review of a Wild Twist apple, from Giant grocery, late-Jan:

Two “wild twists” regarding this apple come to mind —

First, that it was once known as the Sweet Cheeks apple, which is a puzzling and vaguely-porny name, and I’m fascinated by how anyone thought that was a good name for an apple, because it’s a terrible name for an apple, yet also somehow an amazing name for an apple. Especially if you were intending to cat-call the apple on the streets of Appletown, like a weird apple creeper.

Second, that for an apple once named SWEET CHEEKS and now named WILD TWIST, the apple is alarmingly mid.

It’s crunchy, not crisp. It’s moderately juicy. It’s incredibly sweet, with minimal tartness detected. The cheeks, they are sweet, and nothing else beyond that. Its taste is, you know, apple. There’s zero complexity afoot. It’s just such a dullard’s apple. I don’t hate it! It’s fine! Totally fine! I’d eat one if you gave it to me but I’d never choose it directly.

I ate it and was left with almost no impression. Like I barely have any memory of eating the apple. I know I ate it. You can watch me eat it here. But it passed through me, like winter light through a clean window.

I’m to understand that this is a Honeycrisp x Pink Lady cross, and I like both of those apples, but smash them together and you get something less than the individual parts, I guess.

This is a straight-down-the-middle 4.5/10. My initial score was a truly-median 5/10, but I feel like, “I would eat this but never seek it” drops it below that. It’s whatever. It’s fine. Meh.

Wild Twist: The wild twist is *fart noise*