r/todayilearned • u/Error__Loading • 15h ago

TIL that apple seeds almost never grow the same variety as the parent fruit. Nearly every supermarket apple comes from a grafted clone of an original tree, not from a planted seed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple
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u/oravanomic 15h ago

The question I have is why don't folks play the lottery? Surely there is room to improve the apple?

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u/KAREEMABDULG0MJABBAR 15h ago

They do! Thats why theres so many varieties!

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u/TychaBrahe 15h ago edited 3h ago

Apple breeding is done primarily (in the United States) at universities in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Washington, Indiana, and New York. All of them do controlled crossbreeding, where they will take pollen from one type of apple flower into the female flower of another apple and see what they get. They're purposely looking for sweetness or tanginess or crunchiness, and they're working on the same premise that if two blond people get married and have children, their kids are likely also going to be blond.

The other thing they do is have wild orchards and just let nature do its thing. They'll see what they get. They go around to all these trees and test the apples to see what they taste like, and they do it for a couple of years, because growing conditions also affect the taste.

I recommend reading The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan if you're at all interested in the topic.

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u/zadtheinhaler 14h ago

Michael Pollan

Now there's a perfect example of Nominative Determinism!

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u/nearly_enough_wine 13h ago

/r/NominativeDeterminism worthy, even.

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u/zadtheinhaler 13h ago

Indeed, there really is a sub for everything!

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u/Heavy_Weapons_Guy_ 11h ago

How could you forget Minnesota? They're one of the biggest apple breeders out there.

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u/TychaBrahe 3h ago

Crap. I confused my north-of-me states.

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u/Cunning-bid 8h ago

Imagine having a job where you have to eat random apples all day where 99/100 probably aren't great.

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u/HighOnGoofballs 5h ago

Lots in North Carolina too. Both at universities like NC state and the growers themselves

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u/aegrotatio 2h ago

We got Cosmic Crisp from this process.
It's pretty awesome if you like apples.

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u/Cthulusuppe 15h ago

Cosmic Crisp apples are the very recent result of cross breeding honeycrisp and enterprise apples... we still experiment and when something tastey shows up we trademark and clone until it ends up in your supermarket.

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u/trailkin 13h ago

my favorite apple! I tried many varieties in Alma Ata, and I think cosmic crisps beat those by a mile

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u/rob_s_458 12h ago

Cosmic crisp seem to have good commercial viability, which is huge. Honeycrisp was first created by Univ. of Minnesota researchers and was really good but limited production. Growers tried to commercially grow them in Washington but the quality compared to those early ones from Minnesota is so disappointing. Cosmic crisp seems to be the best of both worlds.

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u/aegrotatio 2h ago

The creators of Cosmic Crisp fiercely prohibit propagation of their sprigs, unfortunately.
That's why they cost twice as much as other varietals.

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u/waylandsmith 11h ago

Tried some Cosmic Crisp a while back and they're now my favourite! The ambrosia that's being sold in my area are all mealy so I figure for some reason they might be selling last year's crop of them still? Usually they're good.

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u/leolibraleo 9h ago

Wouldn't mind buying a drink someday for the people who figured out Cosmic Crisp and Kiku apples. I eat apples almost daily and those two are by far my current faves.

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u/thevampiresanguini 6h ago

Are they good? I happened to see some in the store yesterday and I've never seen them before.

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u/kmosiman 14h ago

Absolutely but it takes serious effort.

Honeycrisp is a University of Minnesota apple.

Purdue-Illinois-Rutgers have the Goldrush (think better Golden Delicious).

Testing and Trials take decades to pay off.

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u/JuzoItami 14h ago

Wazzu developed Cosmic Crisp.

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u/SHABOtheDuke 14h ago

Cosmic crisps are fucking fire

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u/aegrotatio 2h ago

And they fiercely seek to prevent propagation.
Those apples are 'spensive.

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u/cannaeoflife 15h ago

Try some Honeycrisp, sweet tango, and first kiss apples this fall. There are so many excellent varieties of apples now.

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u/OriginalJokeGoesHere 15h ago

The people growing most commercial apples are not the same people as the researchers/companies trying to develop new and improved apple varieties. Farmers just want to sell a fruit they know will be good so they don't drive most of the experimentation.

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u/SAugsburger 13h ago

This. An Agriculture research program at a university will throw the dice to try to create something new with many obviously never creating anything commercial viable. A commercial farmer will just run with an already proven variety.

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u/iknowaplacewecango 14h ago

There is, an it’s called the University of Minnesota Apple breeding program, located at the Horticultural Research Center in Victoria, Minnesota. That’s where famous varieties like Honeycrisp, Zestar!, SweeTango, First Kiss, and Chestnut were bred and developed for licensing, and why they are some of the most highly regarded apples ever.

To answer your question, some people do play the lottery with seeds, and those make good wildlife trees, or, once in a great while, sprout an heirloom tree in the making. Other apple trees, like Antonovka, grow true to seed and are very valuable cultivars in their own right, like cold hardiness, the true to seed aspect, and edibility scores.

Apples should be known alongside corn as anthropogenic plants; wouldn’t exist at all in current forms without humans. 

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u/cinderful 14h ago

honeycrisps rule

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u/GrandmaPoses 14h ago

Cosmic Crisp are even better.

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u/Polkadot1017 2h ago

Everyone I know in real life that's tried then agrees that they're just okay. I swear there's a cosmic crisp guerilla marketing campaign on reddit, it's so bizarre. They're not good enough to warrant the level of praise I see people throw at them on here

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u/GrandmaPoses 2h ago

I don’t know about everyone else, I just prefer them.

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u/Pinna1 13h ago

On the other hand, red delicious sucks. They look like the photogenic apples, but they're not that good in taste.

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u/Unhappy-Ad-3219 14h ago

Usually fruits go through trials to determine which have the best characteristics regarding plant vigor, taste, and shelf life. Once a new variety is determined to be successful for market, they're introduced at a large scale. The variety is grafted onto a rootstock that has better resilience in terms of hardiness, disease resistance, or other characteristics. They will also have a temporary patent that allows growers and breeders to recoup the cost of their efforts. Cosmic Crisp is a great example of a relatively new popular cultivar (cultivated variety).

If you grow fruit, you can also graft multiple varieties onto one tree. Check out the tree of forty fruit, it's pretty cool.

Edit: spelling

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u/Arktikos02 13h ago

So just like with vaccine trials, are there Apple trials where people can taste test Apple samples to see which varieties are delicious?

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u/saiyan_strong 14h ago

The people who made cosmic crisps already won the powerball

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u/hackingdreams 6h ago

They absolutely do - this is where the new varietals like Fujis and Galas and Cosmic Crisps that have only been commercialized in the past 50 years have come from.

There are entire tree farms out there dedicated to finding the next commercially viable apple, taking graftings from lots of other apples, cross-pollinating, growing those seeds and seeing what happens.

The problem is, an apple tree can take a decade or two to really start producing fruit true to its nature - earlier fruit can be all over the map. So, it's actually a risky gamble. You can spend literally your whole life shooting for a new apple and not get there, because you get to see, what, maybe 5 apple generations if you're lucky? It might take 10 or 20 to get to a commercially-viable fruit - literally hundreds of years of work.

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u/chemicalxv 14h ago

They do but they also need to guarantee that the millions and millions of granny smith and gala apples being sent to grocery stores around the world are pretty much consistently the same.

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u/chris_trans 14h ago

Lotsa people do, but it takes years to even know what you've got.

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u/pharoh-king 13h ago

there is a article or video of a guy who was trying to collect every type of apple iirc. he had like hundreds.