Big, shiny, colorful and appetizing apple was sitting in my hand ready to be consumed. There is such a variety of products in America and I, newcomer then, was fascinated and excited especially about apples. I was an apple fan, I ate apples like kids eat candy on Halloween; I even picked apples from the trees in the huge community garden back in my home city before they even have a chance to ripen.
I was an apple fan until I bit into that big, shiny and colorful apple. Biting into it was like biting into one of those display fruits that look deceptively real but really made out of wax. It didn't taste like apples I knew back home. It was bland and boring.
Later I discovered an organic apple with much improved taste. Still, it wasn't close to my ideals. The true apple happiness occurred when one day I found a guy on the Farmers market who was selling real, tasty apples. They weren't shiny and were pretty small in size but the taste was right.
Unfortunately, the farmer didn't come back to sell his apples after that summer. I'm assuming he was losing business with his less attractive real apples.
The
BBC News article dating way back to 2001 says that organic apples do taste better but are less efficient and produce half the yield. And the taste heavily depends on quality of the soil which gets ruined by conventional farming that include chemical treatments.
So my concern is that the fruit of the future will have no taste, since even organic farms implement conventional farming (that's why even organic apples don't taste quite right). My only hope are local farmers but even they are hard to find.
...Maybe I'll ask my mother to send me a package with apples from that community garden back home.
