What people want, judging by their market behavior, is reliability. A lot of the best-tasting apples are inconsistent in quality, ship or store poorly, or have a short growing season. I love eating fresh heirloom apples, but Honeycrisps are 10% great, 80% good, and 10% disappointing, which I prefer to 30% good, 30% disappointing, and 40% unavailable.
The idea of a year-round fruit crop is a modern supermarket creation. Most food is seasonal. If a consumer are unaware of its seasonality, that’s because someone is working hard to hide that fact.
I try to enjoy asparagus when it is in season, new potatoes when they are in season, etc. Just because some crops are bred for months and months of storage doesn’t mean they actually taste great.
No, of course it is not from cold storage; instead the produce is flying around the world so that you can have them whenever you want.
Cold storage, jets, and long-haul trucking are particularly bad for some types of produce, not so bad for others.
Anyway, I’m not fighting the modern world, I like having tomatoes in January. But this article and discussion is about how you can have good apples, or you can have year-round apples at scale, but you can’t have both. And a lot of that comes down to the supermarket training consumers to expect the same produce every week.
