This is a honeycrisp apple.
It was designed and created to be the best.
It’s a feat of science and economics, patience, and ingenuity all culminating in this one
remarkable fruit.
This apple was designed and created to be the best.
It’s a feat of science and economics, patience and ingenuity all culminating in this one
remarkable fruit.
The honeycrisp.
To understand what makes honeycrisps so appealing, you have to go to the cellular level.
The cells of the honeycrisp are much larger than other apples, meaning they have larger
sugar-filled pockets of water called vacuoles.
As apples ripen, they produce enzymes which alter the pectins that glue the cell walls
together, reducing the adhesion between cells.
Apples like the Honeycrisp, retain the strong bonds between cells even as they ripen so
when you bite into it, the cells burst open releasing the juices inside.
In apples like the red delicious, the enzymes are able break down the bonds so your teeth
just cleave off the cells at the cell walls, giving you that unpleasant mealy texture.
So, how did we get from here to here?
Back in the 1800s, there were upwards of 14,000 unique varieties of apples in the United States.
Apples like the Streaked Pippin, Boys Delight, the Babbit, and the Lady Finger.
An overabundance of apple varieties all unique in size, color, and taste.
But 100 years later, most of them have been forgotten.
The birth of industrial agriculture sent refrigerated trains crisscrossing America, delivering a
bulk supply of apples to supermarkets across the country.
Apples had to last longer and, in order to sell, look prettier.
So the apple industry settled on perfecting the look of just a handful of varieties at
the expense of their taste.
This cosmetic breeding meant a pretty, shiny apple with tough and bitter skin.
This is where the hero of our story enters: David Bedford, an apple breeder from the University
of Minnesota.
Tired of the Red Delicious’s reign atop the the produce aisle, he was determined to
find something better.
And he did, after taking a bite from an apple off a tree that was marked to be cut down.
This was the very beginning of the honeycrisp apple.
He spent the next 30 years cultivating that apple, finally introducing it to the marketplace
in 1991.
But, why did this take three decades?
An apple is basically a womb of the mother tree, inside are its offspring and like humans
each individual seed is a little different.
If a seed grows into a tree, its apples will not be identical to its parent tree.
Which is a problem when you’re trying to create a product that should look and taste
the same, every time you eat it.
Apple trees can take up to 10 years to produce fruit so the selective breeding process is
very slow.
So, in order to produce identical apples, trees must be cloned.
A tree is cloned by grafting a shoot from the original tree onto a living root, and
then sold to farmers.
Meaning every McIntosh apple you’ve eaten is a clone from the original tree discovered
in 1811.
Since its release in 1991 the Honeycrisp has taken off.
It’s now the fifth most purchased apple variety and the fastest growing in popularity.
But there’s another important point to make here.
This lack of biodiversity is dangerous for crops.
Since the commercialization of the apple in the past century we may have lost 80 percent
of traditional apple varieties.
The identical genetic code of most of America’s apples means a single disease could wipe out
huge portions.
The Ireland Potato Famine, was caused when a bad fungus was able to spread through the
country because all the potatoes were genetically identical.
So beyond being crisp, juicy, and delicious, Honeycrisps are heralded because they show
that apple diversity could be marketable.
Basically, because of the popularity of Honeycrisps, more breeders are making more varieties of
apples to try to dethrone the new king.
Hundreds apples have been released around the world in the past decade.
Apple growers and eaters are lining up to get a taste of new varieties like Cosmic Crisp,
SweeTango, Rave, and Juici.
Returning us closer to our rich history of apples.
Thanks honeycrisp.