The Golden Age of Apples

If you're older than 55 or 60, what apples were around for sale when you were growing up? 

I'm from Upstate New York, so I guess I was spoiled, because I lived relatively near Cornell University, which has been working on apple varieties for a long time. I thought it was normal to have more kinds of apples available for at least part of the year than just the Red Delicious we saw during the winter months. 

This nifty article from Scientific America, We Are Living in the Golden Age of Apples, is full of facts I never knew, and now I live almost on top of the University of Minnesota's agricultural campus, which is Cornell's Midwestern twin when it comes to cold-climate apple-breeding. 

First of all, apples originated in Central Asia: Malus domestica, descendent of the wild Malus seiversii of Kazakhstan. That was crossed with another wild species, Malus sylvestris (which I assume was a bit more shade-tolerant, since sylvestris in plant names usually means woodland). The Romans are said to have developed the practice of grafting to propagate particular good-tasting fruit onto useful rootstocks.

What I didn't know in my rural part of New York was that the varieties we saw each year were available near us because they were developed in New York and grown in local orchards only: Macintosh and Cortland are two I remember particularly. The only ones you could get all year, nationally, up through the 1980s sometime, the article says*, were Red Delicious, Granny Smith, and Yellow Delicious. (We always got a Red Delicious and an orange in stockings at Christmas.)

Commercial apple breeding is bifurcated, says Scientific American, into before Honecrisp and after it. The 1980s University of Minnesota introduction — at first only available in U-Pick operations — has a disruptive genetic trait that makes it a "high-acidity, high-sugar apple." Before that, apple textures were categorized as either soft and mealy, or firm and dense. They had to make a new category called "crisp" for Honeycrisp.

The article explains in pretty good detail how apple breeding works today. It ends with info on what kinds of traits they're working on in today's crowded marketplace:

One of the biggest challenges to developing new varieties is that the ones we have now are so good. “The bar has risen so much,” Bedford says. Any new apple variety must be better than what already exists to justify developing it and bringing it to market. “We are some of our biggest competition"...

I particularly like that they are trying to breed apples that only grow to a size that would fit well into a child's hand. That was one thing we wished for when Daughter Number Three-Point-One was small.

As David Perry (lollardfish) said on BlueSky last month,

Do you ever have that moment where you’re eating a delicious Honeycrisp apple and you think: “fuck yes, a public university made this!!!” Or is that just me?

That guy Perry is referring to, Jim Luby, just retired from the University of Minnesota. There are people at Cornell's ag school (which is part of the SUNY system, not the private part of Cornell) doing just the same.

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* The article says 1980s, but though the Honeycrisp patent is from 1988, the plant was released in 1991.  Pepin Heights Orchards in Lake City, Minn., delivered the first Honeycrisp apples to grocery stores in 1997.