#or at least spiteful consumerism lol

[zf7]

omg.  apples (like ants) fall into the category of endlessly exciting. prepare for the rise of the COSMIC CRISP:

Barritt, then the head of the apple-breeding program at Washington State University, made the cross that led to Cosmic Crisp in 1997. (Because of how long it takes test trees to mature and produce fruit, 22 years from cross to launch is fairly quick when it comes to bringing a new product to market. “Biology is just a real problem here,” said Barritt.) Its parents were Enterprise, a robust, late-ripening, long-storing apple, and a relatively new player called Honeycrisp — much despised by growers, who found it finicky and frustrating, with at least a quarter of its fruit never making it into grocery stores. Still, the latter’s large cells gave it a texture, juicy and explosive, unlike any other apple on the market; before long, consumers’ demand, and the prices they were willing to pay, was so high that growers were planting the damn thing all over the place in spite of themselves — and also starting to think differently about apples in general. (McDougall called Honeycrisp “the 8-billion-pound gorilla in our industry.”) The experience of an apple is really five things, Barritt explained. Only two of them, sugar and acidity, are actually about flavor, and there’s a natural divide between people who like sweet and those who prefer tang. It’s the three measures of texture that unite us all: “Everyone likes crisp, everyone likes juicy, and nobody likes soft.”

a fun article combining apples, agriculture, branding, consumerism, economics, and ultimately, identity.

identity through food:

One wonders what he would think of today’s grocery stores. “Food has become such a dream world, really,” O’Rourke, the marketing economist, told me recently. He was ruminating on so-called superfoods and on the way food marketing tends to focus on “extrinsic qualities” — a brand, a logo, a story — more than the food itself. We want what we eat to save our lives; to reflect our worldliness, the uniqueness of our identities; to fulfill our desire for the new and interesting. One result is that some of the most staple of staples — things like bread or milk or apples — are having a hard time competing. Though DeVaney laughed that people will balk at a $5 price on a 10-pound bag of potatoes, but not on a pint of specialty ice cream, he knew which side of the divide he wanted apples to be on. “We really don’t want consumers buying their food the way they buy gasoline: assuming that everything is identical and they’re just buying on price,” he told me. “Apples need to offer the same kind of novelty within the apple category as consumers can get when they buy…” he trailed off, thinking. “Dragon fruit!”

lol: 

They all politely made clear that this was the sort of romantic but deeply dumb question that only an industry neophyte would ask.

#romantic but #deeplydumb