Good riddance. Red delicious apples get mealy fast, sometimes before you buy them. I kept waiting for the article to acknowledge this, and the closest it came was "tastes have sifted." Bah, who has ever liked a mealy apple? Gala, Fuji, and especially Braeburn stay crisp and tasty longer.
Strangely, yellow delicious stays good despite getting softer. It doesn't get mealy, just softer, and it's still great to eat.
Basically nobody gets 'em straight from the tree, though. I live in an apple-growing state, and all the Red Delicious apples in the supermarket still come from Washington, 2,000 miles away.
They are bred, but you're also correct that any given variety is all grafted from one original tree. Apples can be bred by cross pollinating varieties, planting the seeds, and then taking scions from the sprout and grafting them onto mature trees (sometimes with dozens of varieties of apple grafted to the same rootstock) so that they yield fruit faster. I think it's typical to go through about 1000 seedlings before you find a good apple for fresh eating (many more are good for cider though).
You can also just plant the seeds and let them grow naturally, but it takes a lot longer to get any kind of results (not to mention more space).
I'm just getting started on this process at my farm actually (apples, pears, asian pears, and cherries so far, seedlings are growing, but I haven't grafted scions yet). It's a major exercise in long-term record keeping.
Perhaps the etymology of the word will help with the connection to the taste. In Dutch (another Germanic language) mealy = 'melig', which is close to 'meel' (: flour). There you have the connection to the sawdust-taste. Sawdust and flour, i think, taste pretty much the same.
When you say yellow delicious do you mean golden delicious? From my experience those are great fresh, but once they've gotten pretty soft then they become bland. Sometimes they'll retain sweetness but if so it doesn't last for very long.
Golden Delicious can also get mealy, but quality varies a lot. As a kid, they were my favourite apple, but as I got older, they got softer and more mealy. Or maybe they were always mealy I only started noticing it then.
I don't buy them anymore. When I buy apples (which is rarely), I usually get either Jonagold (cheap and good enough), or Gala or Braeburn when I want something better.
Red delicious are actually quite good right after they are picked.
Perhaps the reason why we don't like Red delicious is the 'paradox of choice'. 40 years ago, there were perhaps 4 varieties of apples on average in a grocery store, today perhaps 9 or 10. Perhaps with the sweeter, crispier apples brought by advances in Agri-tech the Red Delicious has become lackluster in comparison.
This doesn't sound right, but perhaps you are in an atypical part of the world.
40 years ago you would, I expect, find a larger variety of apples, most of them heirloom (ie. open pollinated, with a history you could trace back several hundred years, and were free to propagate at home) at the 'average grocery store'.
Now you'll typically find a selection of apple varieties that were bred relatively recently, selected for shipping and long storage life (ie. ability to retain colour, sweetness (not necessarily flavour), resistance to bruising, consistent colour and shape, russets are eschewed as they're not currently popular, etc).
To the east of London, UK, there's a (somewhat) government-run farm at Faversham, where they are maintaining a mighty collection of apples - somewhere around 2,500 distinct varieties. They also maintain around 700 cherry, and 500 pears, amongst other fruits ... many of which they can trace back several hundred years.
Complaining about just one apple variety seems to be totally missing the point - you can most certainly find, with some small effort, an apple that perfectly suits your idea of the perfect specimen.
As an American who's almost 40 and remembers grocery shopping with my mom as a young child, there were typically only three common apple varieties available: red delicious, golden/yellow delicious, and granny smith. That's it.
Nowadays, even at my crappy Food Lion, I can find those three, plus usually 2-3 additional. At local higher end groceries, I can find 8-10.
At my local farmers' market, I can find 20-30 (when they're in season).
My personal favorites are Honeycrisp, Jonagold, and Pink Lady, but since Jonagolds aren't common in my state and Honeycrisps are a restricted patent and very expensive, we usually buy gala, fuji, and sometimes braeburn.
It is not a paradox; it is perhaps irony if those same people would prefer non-agri-tech fruit if you ask them (which, totally gut-reaction-based, I suspect is the case).
But many traditional varieties are much nicer than the Red Delicious... I've never eaten one right off a tree, but the R.D.s that make it into stores seem to be pretty bland and "one-dimensional" (purely sweet, no noticeable sourness or other tastes), and often have a sort of nasty bitter tasting skin.
[I notice that Fuji apples are a R.D. cross from the 1930s... But Fuji are vastly tastier (and more attractive!)...]
Has the apple itself changed? I don't remember the modern frustration with mealy red delicious apples when I was a kid - I loved them back then. Is modern shipping or farming rougher now?
I'm not sure how old you are, but I'm 33 and remember hating red delicious since elementary school because they were mealy. So by the late 80s, at least, the mealiness had set in.
36 and the same. I specifically remember thinking that apples from the harvest out in the country were mana from god and only available on a farm in autumn. Then one day Braeburn showed up in the supermarket, and since then I have never become visually aware a Red Delicious in the same way that none of us here see banner ads.
I generally don't eat apples at all because I'm not a fan of Red Delicious. Although I have had other apples on occasion, in my mind all apples = not my fruit of choice. Reading this though maybe I need to go buy some varieties and try them out.
The article features expert insight into why this might have happened, in case you missed it:
Noting the 1980s as when it all started to go down hill: "But as genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh."
Unfortunately the author (and perhaps others) are confused. This variety is the same, genetically, now as it was 40 years ago.
They're all propagated from cuttings, hence they are genetically identical. Which means the skins are the same as they were before, and the flesh as is bitter (or otherwise) as it was before, etc.
If they weren't, they wouldn't be called the same name, as evinced by many other 'modern' varieties, that are crosses or hybrids of (other) known apple varieties.
> They're all propagated from cuttings, hence they are genetically identical. Which means the skins are the same as they were before, and the flesh as is bitter (or otherwise) as it was before, etc.
No, it actually doesn't mean that. First, genetics aren't the only determinants of those features; environmental factors, growing, shipping, and storage conditions, etc., all play a role.
Second, propagation by cutting doesn't mean they are genetically identical, because mutations still occur and are an important source of variability, and not all of them result in different branding.
AFAIK apple varieties don't change over time, because the same genes are used over and over by grafting the trees instead of growing from seed. This is because seedlings produce wildly different characteristics from their parents.
Strangely, yellow delicious stays good despite getting softer. It doesn't get mealy, just softer, and it's still great to eat.