Without going into the contents of the article, I was surprised to learn recently the number of varieties of apple available. Then I learned apple sweetness and tartness rankings is a thing. I don’t understand why so many exist and need to exist. Why didn’t the whole market just coalesce on a few(2/3) varieties? Do people actively seek a specific variety and all these are in vogue?
There used to be more than the current 7500 cultivars. Many went extinct. There are groups that scour abandoned homesteads looking for surviving trees of lost varieties.
One reason there are so many is that apple trees are readily planted, but each new tree produces a completely different variety of fruit. Rule of thumb is that 1% of trees produce something edible, 0.1% something good, and 0.01% something commercializable.
For this reason, almost all apples you eat come from clones. (As they have been for 100's-1000's of years.)
? Thats the way it was just a few decades ago. Red delicious, and Granny smith.
Now we have more choices, which is good because apples are a species that produce offspring that is frequently quite different than the parents. Meaning every single one of those supermarket apples is the product of a long dead tree being propagated.
Fairly sure all cultivars are the same species. And I dunno about you but I regular see Lady Fingers and Plantains and not occasionally Red bananas at markets here along with the ubiquitous Cavendish, so they obviously are eaten (I've had cooked Plantain in south American dishes a fair bit, but not recently).
But it's probably true that most fruits are more heavily dominated by a single cultivar than apples, and there's rarely more than 2 or 3 alternatives readily available. Esp. berries - can't think of when I saw multiple options for blueberries or blackberries and even for strawberries it's rare to have much choice.
