The Rise & Fall of the Red Delicious Apple

If you look at the supermarket today, the red delicious apple is simply one of many apple varieties that is offered.

“What happened?” you might ask.

An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away:

Apples are one of the most famous fruits. This goes as far back as the Garden of Eden.

Science tells us that apples contain an impressive concentration of antioxidants, particularly in the peel.

Apples can help in regulating blood sugar, to metabolizing bacteria in your digestive system, to fighting cancer.

Research shows a connection between apple consumption and a reduced risk of colorectal cancer, due to the many flavonoids antioxidant activity. Interestingly, no other fruit has such an ability to alter colorectal cancer risks. The more you eat, the more antioxidant impact you receive.

These compounds have also proven to be beneficial against breast cancers. One study reported that apple consumption may prevent colon cancer growth and impede colon cancer progression due to the apple oligosaccharides.

Apples contain flavonols such as quercetin, kaempferol and myricetin, which impart the most dramatic health attributes according to scientific studies of this fruit. They’re the most powerful in the peel and the flesh nearest the peel, while anthocyanins provide the red hue.

It was America’s captivation with flawless perfection that drove ambitious horticulturists of the early 20th century to relentlessly, collectively and literally breed the popular Red Delicious apple variety out of existence. It’s a story with a lesson for us all.

The Red Delicious Was Born:

Jesse Hiatt planted apple seedlings in two rows on his Iowa farm in the late 1870s. This particular time, a mutation formed, which he chopped down for two years in a row. The third year, he decided to let it grow. He nurtured the tree for a decade before the first apple was produced.

Hiatt liked the new, mutant apple’s red and yellow streaks as well as its crisp, juicy flavor. He dubbed it the Hawkeye. The Hawkeye won a nation-wide taste test sponsored by a nursery in Louisiana, which later purchased rights to the strain.

The apple’s new owner, Clarence Stark, aggressively touted it as the “Delicious”. It was christened the Red Delicious.

After Stark spent a quarter-million dollars advancing his apple as far as the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, Stark arranged train shipments of Red Delicious trees to orchards cropping up throughout the fertile Columbia River Valley.

In 1923, an apple grower in New Jersey wrote the Stark family to report a strange phenomenon:

“One limb of a tree he had purchased from the nursery was producing crimson apples while those on the other limbs remained green. A chance genetic mutation that made the apples redden earlier had also given them a deeper, more uniform color, and customers were lining up for a taste.”

One of Clarence Stark’s sons travelled from Missouri to purchase that mutant limb for an impressive amount for the time, which was $6,000.00 and the news of this spread quickly.

The Gettysburg Times announced that 500 growers and gardeners from 30 states showed up at the orchard to chew on the possible implications of the “freak bud” sensation.

The “single-branch mutations,” known as “sports,” produced apples that often tasted the same but looked oddly different than the rest. Even odder, they ripened at random times compared to those of the main tree.

All Kinds Of Apples:

It didn’t take long for growers began grafting branches to exhibit desirable traits onto new rootstock for an unending series of new strains.

Soon after, industrial horticulturalists began breeding programs for the Red Delicious, driven by factors that made large-scale production easier and more profitable for growers, such as long-term storage and early yields.

Apples today are a far cry from the “delicious” fruit it was when Hiatt took to the 1904 World’s Fair. We now have around 40 strains claiming to be Red Delicious.

Selective breeding was at work full steam ahead. Selective breeding is choosing which strains to crossbreed and should not be confused with genetic engineering. A number of the variants fell short of being as tasty as the original.

Published in 2000, a New York Times article explained:

“In creating an apple that packs well, looks terrific, shines to a glossy polish and can live year-round in cold storage, the growers have produced something many of them no longer recognize.”

If it is not broken, why try to fix it? Many of us recall how Coca Cola tried to push the "New Coke", which failed miserably, before reverting back to "Classic Coke".

Between 1997 and 2000, the government reported a $760-million loss to 9,000 apple growers. A federal bailout package amounting to $30,000 was approved for each farmer in the apple-growing business, for at least two years, regardless of loss. This totaled $138 million, but around 20% of the apple growers went under anyway.

Fuji & Gala Step Into the Spotlight:

In the absence of truly tasty apple varieties, American apple growers began developing new apple varieties for overseas markets. The Fuji emerged in the 1930s in Japan as a mix between the Red Delicious and Virginia Ralls Janet varieties. New Zealand’s Gala, is a cross of the Golden Delicious and Britain’s Kidd’s Orange Red. It didn’t take long for them to become a hit in the American market, simply because they tasted good!

Red Delicious production declined by 40%, resulting in an $800-million loss for American apple growers. It also left a huge surplus. It had farmers scratching their heads. The goal when refining new strains was for their apples to look good on a grocery store shelf for weeks at a time, or even after a year in cold storage. The problem with cold storage is that the apples lose much of their antioxidants after a few months. These year old apples are known in the industry as "birthday apples".

Today, the Gala is creeping into America’s top spot along with varieties such as, Granny Smith, Golden Delicious and Fuji, while sales of the Red Delicious, while still maintaining, is transferring to foreign markets.

Sadly, those who know their apples say the key to successfully marketing the Red Delicious is to ship them to areas of the world where the populace doesn’t realize what a genuinely delicious apple is supposed to taste like.

To get fresh apples that are low in pesticides, try to buy them organic and in season, from a local farmer.

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