Honey Crisp Apples are the best tasting apples I have ever eaten but they cost almost triple the price. Pink Ladies are also phenomenal. My 6 and 10 year old like them better then candy.
Fuji are also good, but yeah, honeycrisp are definitely the tastiest apple I have ever eaten... I was brought up on galas and golden delicious and I had no idea that apples could taste as good as a honeycrisp does
The University of Michigan blundered by marketing the apple under the varietal name; varietals are considered inherently generic under trademark rules and so ineligible for protection.
A Pink Lady apple is actually a Cripps Pink, grown and picked in accordance with certain quality standards. Anyone can sell a Cripps Pink, but only licensees of Brandt's Fruit Trees Inc can sell a Pink Lady.
Anecdotally, UMN has one of the best agriculture research programs in the world, and it's entirely based around figuring out how to grow really anything when first frost is early September (Minnesota).
Unfortunately, though, a large percentage of Pink Ladies offered in stores around here (Germany) come from New Zealand... and that even though apples are among the fruit that grow well in Germany. I like Pink Ladies, especially for the texture, but I prefer to buy fruit that does not have to be shipped half way around the globe.
If they're shipping Pink Ladies from New Zealand, and there's an efficient market, can't we imply that it's a better allocation of resources to get Pink Ladies from New Zealand? I mean, they're probably cheaper _even though_ they're getting shipped halfway across the world. What the market is saying is that: the highly skilled population of Germany is probably better off doing more advanced things than growing apples.
I think that the reasoning against shipping apples across the globe is that consumers do not pay the full price; one might argue that the transportation is subsidised by our extraction and burning of oil at a rate much quicker than it is formed
Hmmm, I can get behind the idea that oil isn't priced appropriately given it's externalities, but I would've focused on CO2, with a carbon tax being the solution, rather than looking at the rate at which oil is reformed.
We are depleting oil reserves at about 5 million times the rate they formed.[1] Corollary: oil price reflects an off-books depletion factor of roughly 5 million-fold. The price is vastly too low.
Our fossil fuel consumption translated to present total biomass production (NPP, or the "photosynthetic ceiling"), is a very substantial fraction of all plant growth, I believe about 40%. We currently account for 20% of NPP consumption without utilising biomass as fuel.[1]
The history of why extractive natural resources are costed on a labour-required basis only (and some very questionable economic and legal theories support this) is an interesting accident of history, religion, law, geology, business, oil, and more. I've been digging into that, though have further to go. The short answer is that we'd started using the stuff long before we understood its creation, and by the time we understood we pretended not to care.[2]
The history of oil price response to overextraction in particular is mesmerising, with the booms at Titusville, Spindletop, and East Texas especially. The latter saw price per barrel fall from a $1 target, to $0.13, and then further to $0.02/bbl, before the national (and effectively global) production quota system managed by, of all organisations, the Texas Railroad Commission, was established in 1931. That lasted until 1972, after which you may be aware oil's price fluctuated somewhat.[3]
Similar issues exist for other strategic minerals, as first grasped during WWII, leading to the creation of the Harbord List, now the U.S. Strategic Mineral Reserve.[4]
(Oil is also subject to strategic reserves. You may be aware of an incident involving the U.S. Naval Strategic Petroleum Reserve a few years back, the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration.[5])
Until the early 20th century, only direct labour was considered as a cost of production.[6]
The energy required to ship an apple from New Zealand to California is significantly less than the energy needed to truck it from California to Colorado. Energy policy is strange and counter-intuitive.
I'm impugning your claim that the price of oil is too low.
I asked you to complete the information required to back up the claim and you rejoined with some aside about how there were multiple ways to interpret one of the words in my question.
Sure it does. If it becomes trivial to conjure the equivalent, then it doesn't matter if oil is gone.
My framing is sloppy (because I only talk about the future value of oil rather than the cost of obtaining the equivalent), but I think the point survives it, because the value of oil would drop to the cost of obtaining the equivalent.
Pretty high. It is a primary source of long-chain hydrocarbons, a primary feedstock for chemistry. Most biologically active chemicals produced by industry rely on oil as the chief starting material.
Though any carbon feedstock can address that. For a materials standpoint, there are substitutes.
Natural gas as feedstock to the Haber-Bosch process and coking coal in steel production, for reducing ore, are both much more formidable. They account for a large fraction the consumption of both (15% in the case of coal), and substitutes are difficult.
The story of where Earth's crustal iron comes from, when, and how, particularly as banded iron formations, is another interesting story.
You are probably paying that price no matter what - if you want apples out of season, you either have to keep them in a coolstore for months, or ship them from another part of the world where they are in season. It could be that buying local apples that are 6 months old has a higher impact than shipping them.
Apples don't really all have the same "season" - even though they have a time to be picked, more tart apples are meant to be stored in cool conditions, with the starches converting to sugars and the acidity dropping over time.
And if someone buys a child prostitute, is that the market saying that's the most efficient allocation of resources and the best way for the predator to outlive their dysfunctions? Insert a less polemic example if you want, same point; it's a total non-sequitur.
edit: if you can downvote, you can answer the question. I did my fair share of hard thinking about this, I come prepared, so until anyone has anything, this stands, and you'll either have to step up or live with that.
I know some cafes (and markets etc) near where I live have started pushing [food miles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles) as a bit of a differentiator (in a similar vein to being 100% organic; eg showing the food miles of goods, or guaranteeing that the food mileage is less than X, etc) which would be the kind of movement that aligns with your concern, if of interest.
As did I. In fact, because of how to felt about Red Delicious apples, I thought that I just didn't like apples until I was in my 30s and tried Granny Smith apples.
With the realization that I just hated Red Delicious apples, I tried a few other varieties. I really like Fuji apples too.
When a new variety is on sale, sometimes, I like to buy a bag and try them out.
The article mentioned that thicker skins on the apples make them less palatable when the interior is soggy/grainy textured.
Personally, I like thicker skins but only on Jazz apples, which are tart and sweet. Red delicious are inferior in that the thick skin indeed covers an undesirable mouthful of mush.
Jazz apples are the only apples I buy anymore. They're a bit hard, but they're also the only apple that I actually have to stop myself from eating too many of. It's a shame that they can be harder to find than Fujis and Honeycrisps, which I find a lot more boring (but still miles better than the Red Delicious), but I think they're becoming a bit more common over time.
They're not always available, but I've found that I like Envy apples almost as much as Honey Crisp. And when they show up in stores, Envy tends to be quire a bit cheaper.
Their availability might depend on location, though. I only see them in Toronto for 2-3 months every year.
Opal apples are incredible - tough to beat. But, they are also hard to find... I heard millions of new trees are being planted to keep up with demand... now I'm craving one just thinking about it.
Honey Crisp Apples are the best tasting apples I have ever eaten but they cost almost triple the price. Pink Ladies are also phenomenal. My 6 and 10 year old like them better then candy.