Hyperfixed - Garbage Fruit [Or, The Fruit of Theseus]

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

Robin has a very simple question: No one likes Red Delicious apples. Why are they unavoidable?Please vote for us in the Signal awards!Vote for Best New PodcastVote for Best Live Podcast RecordingPlease think about becoming a premium Hyperfixed Member: https://www.hyperfixedpod.com/joinLINKS:David Karp on KCRW's Good Food InstagramMatthijs Welle's Apple Post on LinkedIn Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Do you have a question that no one in your life can help with? Something that makes the people around you go, yikes, what a weird question. Well, Freak, here on How to Do Everything, we want to help you out. Each week, we get fantastic experts to answer your questions. People like U.S. Poet Laureate Adelimone, bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger, and rapper Rick Ross. Season two, just launched to go listen to How to Do Everything from NPR. Hey, this is Alex. Really quick before we start, Hyperfixed was nominated for a couple of Signal Awards,

and we would love it if you could vote for us in the People's Choice Awards for Best New Podcast and Best Live Podcast Recording. There will be links in the show notes for you to do that, and that is all I have to say. Thanks so much. Enjoy the episode. Hi, I'm Alex Goldman. This is Hyperfixed. On this show, listeners write in with their problems big and small, and I solve them. or at least I try.

And if I don't, I at least give a good reason why I can't. This week, garbage fruit, or the fruit of Theseus. So these days, I am working on a bunch of freelance projects. This is Robin. She lives in D.C. and she works as a podcast producer, which is why when I asked what she's been working on recently, I didn't think it was super weird for her to say this. For a long time, I was living professionally in the world.

world of like spooky history and dark stories. And I have a wealth of, uh, knowledge about ghosts. When you work in narrative podcasting, you spend a lot of time learning weird stuff, walking down roads that other people might not walk, looking at things that might otherwise be overlooked and wondering, what's the deal with that? Which is how Robin came to be thinking about today's question. But the reason that question made it to us, the reason that Robin didn't go chasing the answer herself, is because Robin's best friend is also a podcast producer. My podcast producer, Emma Cortland.

I'm going to recuse myself from reporting on this story, but because this is an audio medium, I feel like I need to tell the audience that my best friend is shockingly beautiful. So anyway, this whole thing started back in January. Robin and Emma were texting about work. Robin was telling Emma about the story she was writing,

and Emma was talking about the question she was trying to answer. and suddenly Robin says, hey, I have a question for you. My boo, there is something that feels so conspiratorial about red delicious apples because we all know that they are total garbage fruits. I don't know anybody in my life who pays for them, and they sort of just happen to you. and you always get them for free. And where do we get them for free? Most of the time, we get them in conference rooms, hotel lobbies, roadside motels.

That's where they sit, and that's where they languish until we take them home. I don't like know their provenance or origin, but I have to imagine the reason they proliferated is because the Federal Highway Administration was like, yo, we're going to build lots of roads. We are going to link this country up over roadways. People are going to travel. They're going to see the country. They're going to do some leisure time. I feel like the government got into cahoots with Big Apple and was like, yo, put your apples along our highways.

And we will both support each other and the American people and their appetites. So I'm convinced that this is a pretty ludicrous conspiracy theory. But Emma insisted that there was an interesting question underneath the question and that I should interview Robin. But you'll forgive me if when I went into my interview with her, I was more than a little skeptical. I think this is like a case of being kind of DC-brained. Like you're like, you're like around lobbyists and so you automatically assume that every benign object in the world has some kind of nefarious lobby box. behind it. Tell me a little bit about your hatred of red delicious apples. I mean, I want to know what it is specifically you do not like about them. Oh my gosh, Alex, have you ever had one that

you liked? The truth is, I have not had a red delicious apple that I liked. But also, I just don't really like apples of any kind. I eat maybe one apple a year, and that's a very generous estimation. So when Emma told me that we should pursue this question, I don't think I realized that the red delicious apple was so widely derided, that among people who actually like the fruit, the red delicious apple is iconic, not as a representation of the peak fruit form, but of how far a fruit can miss the mark. So as I was listening to Robin described everything that she hates about this apple, about its mealy texture and its flavorless flesh, I too started to wonder, why the heck are these apples everywhere?

Truly, it's like, why are they everywhere? And does anybody like them? Like, who is doing the market research on the saleability of these apples? Oh, that's such a good question. Who's buying them, you know? Like, are people eating these under duress? Are they truly eating them out of, like, a perverse pleasure or utility? What's the nature of it?

What if it's just like the aesthetics of them because they're shiny and red? Like, maybe that, like, they are the archetypical, archetypal Apple. Maybe that's it. It's just like, well, they got curb appeal. You know what I mean? Yeah. Do you think that's enough, though? Do you think they would have such staying power if it was only aesthetics?

Look at Apple, the computer. They're no better than a PC. They're so much more expensive. They are very attractive. Yes. But they also have sexy marketing. Sexy shape, sexy marketing. I think that a red delicious apple kind of has a sexy shape, unfortunately.

It's very curvy. Yeah, very curvy. But does it have sexy marketing? I don't think so. That's true. I see no marketing for these apples. So I'm like, so how? I'm sorry, I'm laughing.

Amor just typed in our prep. It looks like the snow white apple. Death is hot. Yeah. At the end of the day, Robin's question was this. She wanted to know how this flavorless, sterile, mealy apple became so ubiquitous, and why it was the apple of choice for hotel lobbies and conference rooms across America. And those felt like questions I could answer.

But I was a little bit worried that whatever answer I found would be underwhelming compared to her conspiracy theory. So I asked her, given the fact that this is almost certainly not going to link back to government collusion, what would feel like a satisfying end to this story? The thing that would be the most satisfying to me is if you just found, like, a single nugget of weird in the truth, which I'm sure is, like, pretty straightforward. But, like, you just found, like, a weird, unexpected twist for me. Like, that would be, that would be good. All right. Well, I think we have everything we need.

So we're going to look around and see what we can find. Thanks, guys. Well, cool. So good to see you both. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I do have to tell you guys up front that there is no apple conspiracy. The reason Red Delicious Apples are the go-to apple for so many hotel lobbies is because they're cheap. And the reason they're cheap is because the supply is so much greater than the demand. And the reason the demand is low is because Red Delicious Apples are generally pretty gross.

So the real question here is, why is the supply so high? Why did so many farmers elect to plant so many orchards filled with so many gross apples? And the weird answer we found is that those yucky apples, they were not always so yucky. The original Hawkeye Red Delicious was indeed delicious. It was highly aromatic, at least in its proper season, the first few months after harvest in September or early October. It tasted great. This is David Karp. He's a pomologist, which means that he studies fruit and cultivation of fruit.

He's based in Los Angeles, and he spent the majority of his life ensconced in the fruit world. He's written about fruit for the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. He was the produce correspondent for Gourmet Magazine, back when that was a thing. And today, he is the co-editor of the Register of New Fruit and Nut Cultivars, which is an authoritative reference work about fruit. And so we asked David, what is the deal with red delicious apples? And of course he knew the answer. Not just because David knows everything there is to know about fruit,

but because apparently the story of the red delicious apple has become kind of a cautionary tale for the fruit world. Okay, so the whole thing starts innocently enough of an Iowa-based apple farmer named Jesse Hyatt. And the story goes that one day, day in 1870, Hyatt decided to take a walk in his orchard. And as he's strolling down these neat and tidy rows, he notices this one weird little tree growing up from the ground, like in between his existing rows of bellflower

apple trees. So Hyatt goes and gets an axe, chops down the weird little tree and he walks away. But the next year, the tree's grown back. Hyatt cuts it down again, and again the tree grows back. On and on this goes until Hyatt finally gives up, and he just decides to let it grow. And when the tree begins to fruit, it's unlike any apple he's ever had before. In fact, it's the best apple Hyatt's ever had. And he gives it a name.

He calls it a hawkye apple after the Iowa Hawkeyes. And in 1893, he sends it off to compete in an international fruit fair hosted by the Stark Brothers Nursery. And this is where the story of the delicious apple really begins. Because once Clarence Stark of Stark Brothers Nursery takes a bite to this apple, he realizes it's going to be the next big thing and he is going to be the guy that gets it there. Stark buys the rights to the Hawkeye Apple

and he gives it a new name. He calls it delicious. And in the style of a small-time drug dealer, he starts sending out delicious apple trees as a free gift with purchase from his family's nursery. And it's a huge expense, but Stark is betting that once people get a taste of these apples, they're going to want to come back and order more.

And time proves him right. By 1922, Stark's delicious apples were estimated to be generating about $12 million a year, which today would be over $200 million. And the success of this apple, the proliferation of it, is doing no small part to its versatility. It was relatively robust and productive and firm and long-storing for its era. It was cosmopolitan. It grew in many different areas. So, for example, the Stark Brothers Nurser, which first popularized,

could sell it all around the country. And most importantly, people actually enjoyed eating it. Its texture was described as being crisp and firm. It was highly aromatic, and the flavor was said to be reminiscent of a very ripe melon. In many ways, the original Red Delicious was the platonic ideal of an apple. So naturally, consumers went crazy for it. It took off fairly quickly. the 1890s through 1920s, and was the most popular, the most grown apple, oh, from the mid-20th

century to the end of the 20th century. I don't know the exact statistics, but I think it was 40% of production as recently as 30 years ago. This is the reason why the Red Delicious is so ubiquitous. Because back when it was delicious, and people couldn't get enough of it, American farmers planted acres and acres and acres of these trees, and many of them are still being cultivated today. But the biggest question remains, right? And that question is, how did we get from the genuinely delicious apple that made this fruit so popular to the fruit that we have today, which is so not delicious that it's become fuel for

conspiracy theories? Well, it turns out that despite being crisp and flavorful and aromatic, there was one problem with the original Red Delicious. The consumer and the marketer all wanted the Red Delicious to be even redder. Okay, so I know this sounds crazy because you're probably picturing a contemporary red delicious apple and thinking, how could an apple get redder than this? That's the reddest apple I know. But the thing we haven't mentioned yet is that the original Red Delicious Apple wasn't actually

very red. I mean, it was red enough to be called a red apple, but when I look at photos of it, I don't even really see a red apple. I see a green apple with red variegation. And apparently, in any given batch of these apples, the amount of variegation would vary from one specimen to another.

So when a batch of these original apples would get set out at a supermarket or a farmer's market or a roadside farm stand, retailers would watch the way that consumers engaged with the produce. And what they saw on a fairly regular basis was that consumers would gravitate toward the reddest of the apples. And maybe rightly so, because the reddest ones would have enjoyed a

favored position on the tree. In that close to direct sunlight where the leaves were soaking up that sunlight and turning them into starch, which would be turned into sugar. So those were the best specimens. So within a certain batch of fruit of one cultivar, maybe it was right to this for the consumer to select the red specimens. But that perfectly natural preference had unintended consequences. Because once marketers realized that consumers were favoring redder apples,

they started paying more money to the farmers who could supply them, which left farmers scratching their heads, trying to figure out how to get more red out of more apples without compromising the qualities that people actually loved about them. So the problem was

that the older strains would get fairly red, but often not until they were overmature from a commercial point of view in that they had shorter shelf life. They would turn mealies. There's one obligation of an apple. When you buy it at the market, it's to be reasonably crisp, crunchy, firm. When you can put your finger through it, that's not good, is it? That's a real screw you when you go to a hotel and they've got a free red delicious and you bite into it and it's mushy and yuck. So what farmers started to do was to keep their eye out for red sports. In the world of fruit trees, a sport is a spontaneous genetic mutation that leads to some

different characteristic. It can happen to a whole tree or just one limb or just one bud. And if this new characteristic is desirable, say if it produces red or fruit, then you can graft the sport and propagate new trees that share this new trait. So in the early 20th century, that's what these apple farmers started to do

with the red sports they found in their orchards. The thing that nobody really appreciated at the time, because we didn't know very much about genetics, was that the genes that gave this apple its delicious flavor were on the same chromosome as the genes that gave it variegated skin. So every time a farmer would graft a newer, redder,

sport, the apples it produced would be a little less sweet. And maybe it was 5% less sweet, but that's not a big difference, is it? The problem is that when you have five or six generations of that, you ended up with something that was considerably less delicious, undermining its name, and a poster child for specious commercial fruit. And from there, the Red Delicious Death Spiral continued. Because once consumers

started to realize that Red Delicious was no longer delicious, or that it had much flavor at all, they stopped buying it at the store. And when they stopped buying it, these uneaten apples started piling up in warehouses and storage facilities, where the already

compromised apple would become even more compromised by months of sitting in the cold. I would say that Red Delicious was relatively low. in acidity, and by the time it had been stored for six months, or God forbid, right now, 11 months, you'd have something that had lost its texture, that had lost its acidity, and that is a nasty piece of work. The more farmers tried to make the red delicious apple a perfectly marketable apple,

the worst the apple got, the less people wanted to buy it, until finally, they were forced to confront the fact that it cost more to grow these apples than anyone was willing to pay for them. And even though many farmers had started to rip up their orchards of red delicious trees and replace them with more popular varieties like Fuji and Gala, the change wasn't happening fast enough. Money was flying out the door. And in October of 2000, the situation got bad enough that Congress and President Bill Clinton signed an emergency bailout, the biggest in the history of the apple industry, to cushion the $760 million that the American apple industry had lost over the last three years, primarily because of its devotion to

the red delicious apple. Certainly, it was a rotten day for American apples. But when the New York Times asked farmers for comment, one grower was quoted as saying, nobody should feel sorry for us. We did this to ourselves. So who should we blame for the decline of this apple? What professionals in the field blame is the marketing schemata for public varieties such as Red Delicious? Basically, it's a matter of, have you ever heard of Gresham's law? No. Bad money drives out good.

And so this is bad fruit drives out good. Why is that? Farmers were paid for growing the redest possible red delicious. You cannot blame them for selecting the red strains, even if they don't particularly taste good. The reputation of the red delicious was established by the older, less red strains, but individual farmers had to make the economic decision to plant what enabled them to survive, and they did so. So getting back to your first question, is there some kind of conspiracy or a lobbying group or something?

What accounts largely for the popularity of Red Delicious Apple as a free apple handed out at like conferences and hotels and so forth is that it's cheap. The people who are buying these apples for hotel chains are not homologists. They are not connoisseurs. They are presumably told to get the cheapest possible apple. and they're not the ones who are necessarily even eating them themselves. Red Delicious, because of its flaws, has become less and less popular, and acres are being pulled out year to year. Maybe not every year, but on average. And the prices have dropped, particularly for small-sized Red Delicious, you can get them real cheap,

and that's highly attractive to commercial interests at hotels and conferences, etc. it is the worst when I go to scientific meetings where fruit experts are meeting and we are given red delicious apples by the hotel gag me with a spoon man that I mean don't you just yuck I usually bring my own fruit with me wherever I go I grow great fruit myself stone fruit and I need to have good fruit with me or I'll just go to you know a decent market and ideally a foreign farmer's market. I would never eat those nasty red delicious. There might be other varieties that are okay. I mean, if they have a gala and it's in season, sure, that's fine. And maybe, just maybe, a red delicious in-season, late September, October, November, might be pretty good.

Thanks so much, David. I really appreciate your time. After the break, how the hospitality industry turned the red delicious apple from a fruit into a concept. A pretty unappetizing concept at that. Welcome back to the show. So before the break, we learned all about the rise and fall of the red delicious apple. And along the way, we answered all of Robin's questions. but there was still one small thing that we didn't totally understand. So Robin had come to us asking why the Red Delicious was so ubiquitous,

why it was the go-to apple for hotels and conference rooms when it's generally considered to be such a garbage fruit. And we'd learned that it ultimately came down to a question of cost. In the U.S., the Red Delicious apple is the cheapest apple because the supply vastly outweighs the demand. And that's more or less the end of the story. The thing we still didn't understand was why hotels were offering up the apples at all. Because, yeah, the apples are cheap, but wouldn't it be much cheaper just to serve nothing?

I mean, if the hotels are disconcerned with money, then why spend it on an amenity that people don't actually want, right? Wouldn't it be better to just save the money? You have to admit, it is kind of mysterious. So, just very quickly, before we circled up with Robin, we reached out to someone who could help us understand why hotels were making a choice so illogical that it was fueling her conspiracy theories. I went down their apple rabbit hole at some point, but I am not the, like, the, what do you call it, the professional Apple expert, but it's just a thing that I cared deeply about.

This is Matt Vela. He's Dutch. and the reason we reached out to him instead of like an actual hotelier is because one, we actually did reach out to an actual hotelier and they were like, I've never worked at a hotel that offered apples at the reception desk. And then we realized that even if we talked to a hotelier that did offer apples at the reception desk, that would still only tell us why this specific hotel offers apples. We needed more of an aggregate view, which Matt is pretty uniquely qualified to provide.

From the time this guy first stepped into a hotel at four years old, he knew he wanted to be in the hospitality business. When he was 16, he started working at restaurants, and then he went to the hospitality school, and then he started working for one of the leading hotel chains in the world. But that's where he started to realize that there were things about the hotel business that didn't really make sense. Like, while the rest of the world was using iPhones, for example,

this very famous hotel chain he was working for was still using DOS, So Matt left his work with the hotel to build a company that could make all hotels just a little bit better and a little more logical. And that's what he does today. As CEO of a hospitality tech company called Mews, Matt travels around the world, staying in hotels, and figuring out what parts of the hotel experience can be improved through automation. We take care of the entire hotel operation and everything that feels manual. Like, why is housekeeping always knocking on your doors in the morning when you're sleeping? and it's because technology wasn't given to the housekeepers. And we're trying to really think about every kind of persona in a hotel

when you fix their job. Oh, that's smart. So you can put specific preferences about wake-up time and do not disturb and all that stuff in one central place. Yeah. Anything that frustrates you that creates a manual workflow on the other side is a thing that we'd love to automate. Okay, great.

So what does all this have to do with apples? Well, because Matt is traveling every single week and staying in different hotels all the time. And because it's his job to notice things that could make the experience of a hotel better, he has noticed the bad apple issue. And I want to say, Matt has a lot of really fascinating things to say about apples

and the changing landscape of the hospitality industry, so we're going to put the full interview up on our premium feed. But for the purposes of this episode and this question, the most important thing that Matt told us is that when a hotel puts out colorful apples that don't taste good, it's because they're not really meant to be eaten, like that bowl of limes in the architectural digest video

of Dakota Johnson's house. Their primary purpose is to serve as decor. And even though you can eat these apples, from the hotel's perspective, it's actually better if you don't. So hotels are putting them out with the expectation that guests are not meant to eat them? I think if you were the accountant,

they're like, right, if you don't use toilet paper, I'm making a saving in that room, and it's the same with the apples. If I put an apple out, at least we've done the hospitality thing. We've put the apple out. It's free. You can take it. And if no one eats them, we save costs because I can recycle that apple for five guests until the fifth guest who does like apples eats them.

So that decision was made by an accountant, not by someone who deeply cared about the experience of their guests. Oh, my God. Yeah, there's underlie. There's a depth of thinking that went behind the apples. It's just crazy to me that they are putting these out on the bet that more people won't eat them than will. That's like anti-hospitality.

It's like... Exactly. Before we got off our call, Matt stressed to me that there are hotels that put out good seasonal apples. And every time he stays at one of those places, he makes a point to tell the manager how much he liked the apples. It tells them that you notice the little things they're doing to make your experience better and that those things are worth doing.

So, armed with the answers to Robin's questions and the answers to mine, producer Emma Cortland and I scheduled a follow-up interview with Robin to share what we'd learned. And the first thing she asked was whether or not we talked to former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg. No, we didn't talk to Pete Buttigieg. We did not talk to Pete Buttigieg. So before we get into the answer to your question, do you have any theories about what I'm going to tell you now that you know that we did not speak to Pete Buttigieg?

Okay. So I have to assume y'all went on a little bit of a goose chase, perhaps to warrant such a long episode. So I'm wondering if what you found is weirder than I personally concocted. We told Robin about how Red Delicious Apples actually used to be called Hawkeyes and actually used to taste good. How being so popular was their undoing about the massive bailout of the apples. industry in 2000, and how these new airsats red delicious apples are so far removed from their origin that they're no longer even meant to be eaten, and instead are only out to suggest the concept of hospitality. These red delicious apples we've experienced in our lifetime, they're like the myth about the ship of Theseus, except that in this case, the growers strip the fruit of everything that made it great, of what earned it its name, then slapped some shiny red paint on the side and sold it as if we were buying the same ship, or apple, or whatever.

We told all of this to Robin, and she was thrilled to hear that there was a weird story behind the proliferation of this terrible apple. But there was still one thing that we hadn't told her, and we were waiting for the right moment to do that. So when Robin said this... That is so crazy. Oh, my gosh. So what you're telling me is, like, it is confirmed.

True, all style, new substance, these apples. Yeah. But at one time, they were really something to behold. Do we know what they tasted like? Emma decided it was time to share one last discovery that we'd made in our reporting. So you actually can get a hawk-eye apple. It has a very short window of sale. You can't get it at a grocery store, but you can get it at certain farmer's markets.

So I didn't know when we were going to be able to find one. but we sent Cousin Margie to the farmer's market. For our audience, Emma's cousin Margie is a veteran reporter who works with us in a fairy godmother-type capacity. Hi, Margie. We sent Cousin Margie to buy one of these Hawkeye apples and see what the fuss is about. Okay, are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready.

Okay. Mmm. Well, it's very sweet, but it's not as crunchy as I expected. That's still very interesting. Yeah. Hang on, let me try one more bite. Hmm. I mean, the flavor's really good, but it's just, I thought it was going to be crunchier. Yeah. Can you describe the flavor? Does it have that tannin thing? it does that yeah that yeah and it is it does not taste like a trash apple it tastes like a good apple fuck yeah wow guys i am so tickled i'm charmed i love this i love this i have my neighborhood

farmer's market tomorrow morning and the apple stand is my first start and i'm going to hit hit that with a new Ask them for the stories of the apples at the market. I wonder if they have them. And I wonder if there's a hawk-eye. Well, if I find one, I will send you guys a voice memo about it. Yes, please. All right, my Vue. Awesome, guys.

This is so fun. Thank you so much for all the work you put it on this. I just, I'm so delighted. This is just lovely. Hyperfixed is produced and edited by Emma Cortland, Amoryates, and Sarisau. for Sukkenek. It's engineered by Tony Williams, music by the mysterious brakemaster cylinder, and me, Alex Goldman. You can find bonus episodes, join our Discord, and much, much more at hyperfixedpod.com slash join. For our premium members, we are going to be having a watch

party of the Night of the Living Dead on our Discord on October 16th. We'll all be hanging out. I will undoubtedly be sharing trivia because I love that movie. It'll be fun. Hyperfixpod.com slash join. Hyperfixed is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, creator-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Discover audio with vision and radiotopia.fm. Also, very important, hyperfixed cannot exist without your problems, so if you have problems that you need solved by us, please submit them at hyperfixedpod.com. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you soon. Radiotopia from PRX.