Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is from the article “The Awful Reign of the Red Delicious” by Sarah Yager.

In the 1870s, Jesse Hiatt, an Iowa farmer, discovered a mutant seedling in his orchard of Yellow Bellflower apple trees. He chopped it down, but the next season, it sprang back through the dirt. He chopped it down again. It sprang back again. “If thee must grow,” he told the intrepid sprout, “thee may.”

A decade later, Hiatt’s tree bore its first fruit. The apples were elongated globes with red-and-gold striped skin, crisp flesh, and a five-pointed calyx. In 1893, when Stark Brothers’ Nursery of Louisiana, Missouri, held a contest to find a replacement for the Ben Davis—then the most widely planted apple in the country, strapping and good-looking but bland—Hiatt submitted his new variety, which he called the Hawkeye. “My, that’s delicious,” Clarence Stark, the company’s president, reportedly said after his first bite.

But not for the first time in apple lore, one sweet taste precipitated a fall. Stark Brothers’ soon secured the rights to the Hawkeye, changed its name to the Stark Delicious (only after the branding of the Golden Delicious, in 1914, did it become the Red Delicious), and began an ambitious marketing campaign. Over the next two decades, the nursery spent $750,000 to promote the new apple, dispatching traveling salesmen to farms across the country and exhibiting the Delicious at the 1904 World’s Fair. After the completion of the Great Northern Railway, Clarence Stark sent trainloads of seedlings to newly established orchards in the Columbia River Valley, their leaves trembling as the engines rumbled West.

With its hardy rootstocks and juicy, curvaceous fruit, the Red Delicious quickly became a favorite of growers and consumers from coast to coast—and as its commercial success grew, so did its distance from Hiatt’s Hawkeye. In 1923, a New Jersey orchardist wrote to the Starks to report that 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. Paul Stark, one of Clarence’s sons, travelled up from Missouri and laid down $6,000 for the limb. News of the deal spread, and soon The Gettysburg Times reported that more than 500 horticulturalists from 30 states had gathered at the orchard to discuss the “freak bud” that produced “the marvel apple of the age.” Their meeting marked the beginning of an era of fruit improvement, as growers began to seek out and cultivate similar mutations.

By the 1940s, the Red Delicious had become the country’s most popular apple, with the broad shoulders and lipstick shine of a Golden Age Hollywood star. The cosmetic changes were a boon for industrial agriculturalists: Apples that turned rosy before they were fully ripe could be picked earlier and stored longer, and skins with more red pigment tended to be thicker, which extended shelf life and hid bruises. But as genes for beauty were favored over those for taste, the skins grew tough and bitter around mushy, sugar-soaked flesh. Still, by the 1980s, the Red Delicious made up 75 percent of the crop produced in Washington. By the time selective breeding had taken its toll, according to apple expert Tom Burford, a few big nurseries controlled the market, planting decisions were made from the remove of boardrooms, and consumers didn’t have many varieties to choose from. The Red Delicious became “the largest compost-maker in the country,” he said, as shoppers routinely bought the apples and threw them away.

Then in the 1990s, new varieties that American growers had originally developed for overseas markets began to edge into the domestic market. Shoppers had been “eating with their eyes and not their mouths,” Burford said. And now their taste buds had been awakened. A sudden shift in consumer preferences, paired with growing competition from orchards in China, took the industry by surprise. Between 1997 and 2000, U.S. apple growers lost nearly $800 million in surplus crop. They had “made the apples redder and redder, and prettier and prettier, and they just about bred themselves out of existence,” a marketing director for one Northwestern fruit company told The New York Times.

Since then, Red Delicious production has declined by 40 percent. While the apple is still by far the most common in the U.S. —growers produced 54 million bushels of Red Delicious in 2011, compared to just 33 million bushels of its closest competitor, the Gala— the industry is adjusting to a changing market.

© 2014 The Atlantic Media Co., as first published in The Atlantic Magazine.All rights reserved. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.