The Red Delicious—picture-perfect on the outside but mealy, clammy, fleshy yet flavorless within—is no longer America's favorite apple. The Gala overtook it, and hopefully the noble Granny Smith will further dethrone it soon.
Red Delicious’ slippage will be mourned by few. As Sarah Yager wrote in the Atlantic in a history of the variety a few years ago, the Red Delicious is a “paradox”: “alluring yet undesirable, the most produced and arguably the least popular apple in the United States.” They’re gorgeous to look at, like a cartoon apple landed in your real-life fruit bowl. It has a deep-red color and perfectly unblemished skins; its bodies always taper to a perfect little five-pointed bottom. But its flesh tastes—as the two enthusiasts who run the apple fan website Orange Pippin write—too sweet, “like a slightly over-ripe melon”; also, “the skin can be quite tough.” In understated tones, Orange Pippin’s expert apple-tasters add: “Overall Red Delicious can be quite a refreshing apple to eat, but its chief characteristic is that it has almost no flavor at all.”
The Red Delicious is the perfect symbol of American culture. Its attractive surface doesn't just hide the rot beneath, it tells you up front how great it tastes.
Previously in the disgusting Red Delicious apple:
• How the worst apple took over the United States, and continues to spread
• Why the disgusting Red Delicious apple rules American grocery stores
• Why the most horrible apple in the world is also the most grown\
Photo: Zajac (CC) Read the rest
Dennis Wojtkeiwicz paints large-format works of thinly sliced fruit for his Rosettes series, revealing the elegant beauty and symmetry of nature. Read the rest
Tokyo based artist Yuni Yoshida created her Layered series by manually cutting out cubed "pixels" of foods that recreate the gestalt of the original. Read the rest
There's the Museum of Ice Cream, and more recently, The Museum of Selfies. Now there's an Instagram-friendly pop-up museum dedicated to California's most iconic fruit, the avocado. It's called The CADO and it opens in June in San Diego. Tickets are available now.
Step into a world of the green you love to ‘gram and emerge with more than a pretty picture (but you’ll get plenty of those, too!). Built out of 16 shipping containers fused together to create an expansive mobile structure, you’ll walk into our lobby and be fully immersed in a story as each exhibit builds on the one before. Get ready to see the California Avocado in a new light as you walk through the skin and into the fruit. Are you shrinking or is the avocado growing?
Follow their Instagram if you want to see lots of avocado toast:
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Currently craving. ✌🏼💛🥑 . #DYK California Avocados act as a “nutrient booster” by helping increase the absorption of fat-soluble nutrients like vitamins A, D, K and E. So, we vote #avotoast all day, er’ry day. . 📷: @breakfast_and_bowls
A post shared by the CADO (@thecado.co) on Apr 11, 2018 at 12:09pm PDT
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What do you top your toast with? ✌🏼💛🥑 . . 📸: @cultivatewithkruti
A post shared by the CADO (@thecado.co) on Mar 23, 2018 at 6:01am PDT
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No right way. ✌🏼💛🥑 . . 📷: @laurennataliephotography
A post shared by the CADO (@thecado.co)
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Micki Myers paints very realistic vegetables and fruit. Just one item in each case, floating in a pure existential realm of nutritious plant life. Pictured above is an apple. Here's a pickle:
Also, an obligatory banana. Read the rest
Break out the headphones for this tingly and satisfying sound design of macro timelapse thawing of fruits and vegetables. The visuals are quote appetizing and lovely, but the sounds are what really make it amazing. Read the rest
Compare Fruits is your one-stop shop for comparing fruit. Whether you are comparing bananas with plantains, lemons with limes, or, indeed, apples with oranges, it has all you need for your fruit-comparison needs. (Warning: nutritional woo, but no worse than gadget spec woo) [via] Read the rest
What a fine fruit hack! Read the rest
Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. Read the rest
Now you can accessorize with cruelty-free "leather" created from discarded fruit, thanks to Fruitleather Rotterdam. Read the rest
Pumpkins blush with shame when they watch this video. [h/t Richard]
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Mike Warren carved a watermelon into this delightful shark fruit bowl! Read the rest
Josefina Tometich has some mighty fine mangoes growing on a tree in her Florida home. But don't even think of taking one: she's got a BB gun, and she knows how to use it. The 64-year-old mango enthusiast was arrested after she allegedly shot out the rear window of Christopher Richey's truck for trying to steal one of her beloved fruits.
Tometich's family says "no trespassing" signs are on the property, and they'll put up more, to deter mango thieves. But Richey maintains the mango he saw was in the roadway, and therefore free for the taking. In the end, he and his wife left without any mangoes. Tometich was arrested for firing a missile into a dwelling, vehicle, building or aircraft.
[via]
Random Mango Fact: "In India, a certain shade of yellow dye was attained by feeding cattle small amounts of mango leaves and harvesting their urine. Of course as stated above, this is a contraindicated practice, since mango leaves are toxic and cattle are sacred. It has since been outlawed." [via] Read the rest
A real life Fruit Ninja! (via Laughing Squid) Read the rest
Some thoughtful internet person dumped a bunch of photos of exotic fruits on imgur. I suppose if you live in a tropical climate where there's a wide variety of such fruits, there's nothing weird about them. I've eaten like half of these! I love traveling to new places and seeing others on this list I've never seen before. The world is so diverse and delicious. [via reddit]
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Despite almost universal agreement that basically defines "so boring as to become disgusting", the Red Delicious apple continues to be the most-grown variety in the US. More than 50,000 bushels of the vile things are turned out every year. This story by Rowan Jacobsen in Mother Jones explains the Red Delicious' undeserved success and follows the stories of entrepreneurs who are trying to bring back varieties of apple long lost to the consumer market. Read the rest
