Red Delicious.
They used to be delicious,
but not so much anymore.
How did they go from spending 70 years
as America's favorite apple,
to today, where they're not even stocked
at my local supermarket.
I've come to the Belkin Family Lookout Farm,
one of the oldest in Massachusetts,
to find out what happened.
Who killed the Red Delicious?
Our story begins 10,000 years ago
in the Tian Shan mountains of Kazakhstan
with a species of tree known as the Malus sieversii.
It produced fruits which were similar enough
to modern apples for you to see the resemblance,
but they also tasted pretty terrible.
Best left for cooking with rather than eating raw.
Eventually some seeds from the tree
made their way to Europe,
and it is at this point,
with European love of all things sweet,
which work began on mutating the apple.
If you're familiar with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution
by natural selection,
then you'll be aware that if parents have
some useful characteristics,
they're likely to pass on these traits
to some of their children.
We can also do this artificially through selective breeding.
For example, if I have one ugly pumpkin,
and were to manually cross-pollinate it
with another ugly pumpkin,
then they're likely to produce some very ugly crops.
If we were to then get one of these very ugly pumpkins
and manually crossbreed it with a very large pumpkin,
well, then we're lucky to end up
with something a bit like this.
Over the centuries, we've used this technique
on pretty much everything we eat,
except, as it turns out, for apples.
Apple seeds are extreme heterozygotes.
That means their genetic makeup includes variations
which combine randomly to cause significant differences
in characteristics to each apple's parent.
In order to make better tasting apples,
the only option is to plant thousands of seeds
and test out fruit from every single tree.
Once you have one which tastes okay,
you clone that individual by taking a wood sample
and grafting it to the rootstock of another tree.
We call a collection of cloned apple trees a cultivar.
If you have one apple from one tree,
and another apple from a different tree,
and they're from the same cultivar,
then they're going to taste and look identical
because they're clones of the same individual.
Occasionally, a grafted individual isn't quite the same
as its parents, which allows farmers to select
for certain traits.
In 1620, settlers landing in Massachusetts
brought with them a selection of English cultivars.
Unfortunately, most couldn't survive in the new conditions
so had to be abandoned.
People still grew apples from seeds
and although these didn't taste very nice for eating,
they were great for making cider with,
which was by all accounts a very lucky thing.
Occasionally, due to pure genetic fluke,
an apple would come along producing nice-tasting fruit
that could also survive in these conditions.
That was something worth cloning.
With this rather haphazard approach,
America eventually came to produce 15,000 varieties
of locally developed cultivars.
Some of these tasted so good that they could be shipped back
to the Old World,
fetching a price up to 10 times that
of the local English variety.
One of these, a hero among apples,
was called the Hawkeye,
later rebranded as Stark Delicious,
and finally to Red Delicious.
It's a good point to note that at this point,
it truly was delicious,
heralded by some as the greatest apple of any time.
As America became more urbanized in the 1900s,
people started to getting their produce from the grocers,
rather than the farmers that grew them.
Rather than stocking all 15,000 cultivars of American apple,
instead grocers selected just one.
That, of course, being the Red Delicious.
There are three factors you need to juggle
when selling apples in the shops.
First of these is taste.
While you may think that it's the most important,
since it's not a factor you can test out
until after paying for it, it really goes by the wayside.
Next, we have appearance.
People want a nice, bright, lipstick red apple,
like the one that Sleeping Beauty ate,
because obviously that was really good for her.
Originally, Red Delicious had these weird yellow patches.
So obviously they had to go.
As it turns out,
the gene which gave them this yellow coloration
is also the same gene which gave them flavor.
So we bred for some really nice-looking,
but ultimately very bland-tasting, apples.
Finally,
people don't want to pay all that much for that produce.
In order to save money on transportation costs
and to stop them bruising, farmers went for an apple
that had thick skin and mushy interior,
making them bruise-resistant,
but also taking away the entire experience
of eating a nice, crisp apple.
Over the decades, we got an apple that looks good
and was really cheap,
but unfortunately didn't taste all that nice.
Our hero had turned into a villain.
By this point, most of America's old school cultivators
had long since been abandoned,
leaving us with no viable alternative.
Someone would have to create their own.
That someone was a man named David Bedford
and a team from the University of Minnesota.
Starting in the 1980s,
they spent 30 years trying to brute force their way
to the perfect apple,
some days testing out 500 different fruit.
Eventually, they succeeded with this one.
It tasted honeyed and had a crispy texture to it,
so they called it the Honeycrisp.
Soon orchards all over the country were growing it.
But many of these were selecting for an apple
which looked better and tasted worse.
David was furious.
It was told that the Honeycrisp
would destroy the Red Delicious, not join them.
In secret, he and his team began to work on another apple,
eventually succeeding a couple of years later
with the SweeTango.
This time, they took out a trademark on the name SweeTango,
which means that you could only sell your apple
as a SweeTango if it actually tasted like one.
Now, customers could buy based on brand recognition
rather than looks alone.
With these building blocks in place,
soon new apples exploded onto the market,
backed up with some insane investment
and rather good advertising.
Under the onslaught of objectively better competition,
it was only a matter of time
before Red Delicious was defeated.
In a way, the story of the apple
is also the story of America.
Arriving in a strange new land,
initially surviving here was difficult,
but as soon people and their orchards were able to thrive.
It's a country built on its diversity,
and made great by some truly fantastic innovators.
Was longterm sustainability ever sacrificed
for short-term profit?
Yeah, of course it was.
But, at least for now, it looks like things are trending up.
Apples, as American as an apple pie.
Until next time,
this has been James Dingley from the Atomic Frontier.
Keep looking up.