Frazz by Jef Mallett for January 19, 2025

What does apples have to do with ruining the world? Auto-tune I could see, but apples? Oh yeah, and the garbage too!

Not ALL apples taste great. Some are sour and unpleasant. But a LOT of them DO taste great.

I don’t understand why they still sell red delicious apples. They were one of the 3 apples available when I was young and they were awful.

There have always been thousands of apple varieties. You just need to go to the farmer’s market, or plant your own.

Well, we can’t let him off that easily:

“By the late 1990s, U.S. commercial orchards were growing fewer than 100 varieties of apples—and only 11 of them accounted for 90 percent of grocery store sales. Experts estimate that 11,000 Heritage varieties were extinct”

bARK.today

The old guy was right. I keep apologizing to my 30 year old and I feel terrible for my niece’s 4 year old.

When I worked on a fruit farm (ca 1958-1960), red delicious were still tasty. They have since been bred for size, shape and color, not taste.

Sounds Gala and Delicious.

Recommend reading about Tom Brown who has spent the later years of his life recovering varieties of lost apples from long-abandoned orchards of Appalachia. atlasobscura.COM/articles/heritage-appalachian-apples

With so many varieties that appear over a year, I’m always ‘auditioning’ apples. The taste of each seems to vary. It is also interesting how the same variety will command nearly $4 a pound and a few months later be $.99 a pound. I seem to enjoy them all, regardless.

Garbage Patch I get. It’s a horror with its own life, similar to but far less benign than the Sargasso Sea, But what is auto-tune?

A little kid tells us how goofy a boomer is for caring about the planet; punctuates it with an eye roll; shares his perspective on the hybridization of apples, much of which he did not witness first-hand.

And this material is relatable to . . . whom, I wonder?

Great, so the burned-out people in California can enjoy some tasty apples!

The “great Pacific garbage patch” is mostly caused by China and Indonesia. The USA has nothing to do with it.

I do wish I understood Caulfield’s point. What does that all have to do with the state of the world now, other than resources being applied where they are least needed.

It used to be that most apples weren’t meant to be eaten out of hand. They were mostly for making cider, and most of the rest were for pies and such.