A friend and I were talking about how the Red Delicious apple is quite red but not actually delicious. In fact, it tastes bad. Yet when you think of an apple, it’s probably the image that comes to mind. This led to a deeper conversation about overpromising, underdelivering, about society. But we eventually returned to apples.
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Everyone knows that the Honeycrisp is the best apple. The only time I’m buying any non-Honeycrisp apple in the store is if I’m turning the apples into something else: a pie, a crumble, a cake, a bread. But for eating, it’s Honeycrisp every damn time.
You may naturally assume that Honeycrisp was an obvious win, then. That discovering the Honeycrisp was as momentous as Newton discovering gravity. Only, it wasn’t.
The Honeycrisp was just one human decision away from slipping into nonexistence. The apple started out as a single tree, called MN1711, which suffered during the winter one year. This one blemish meant that the Honeycrisp was discarded (apple breeding is strict).
But one individual human, the horticulturist David Bedford, suspected that the winter damage might have been a fluke. In 1982, he gave MN1711 another shot and the Honeycrisp became the apple most of us know today as the best eating apple on the planet.
Which is to say that we were one simple human decision away from none of us ever eating a Honeycrisp in our lives. All it took was one decision to give the benefit of the doubt to an apple that, at least according to the official guidelines, was not strong enough for the mass market.
I’m glad we have the Honeycrisp.