My son and I have settled on Gala and Fuji as our go-tos are the farmers market. I actually arrived at the same conclusion as this article about "Red Delicious" - it certainly is red and that's the most that can be said of it.
Red Delicious are absolutely the best apples for throwing at your enemies. They are also the best fruit to be stacked on a cart and driven through during the car chase scene of an action movie. They are also quite useful for making your business look like it has made a token effort towards providing fruits and vegetables for customers.
They are certainly poorly suited for actual eating.
Fujis have a good taste/price ratio, making them my default value option. Honeycrisps are great, but currently rather expensive. Hopefully that price can come down as more Red Delicious orchards are demolished and replaced.
The most bizarre part of the article is where it says people buy Red Delicious and just throw them away. While that would be insane for private residences, the Red Delicious is somewhat of a symbolic icon for "fruit". If you manage a convenience store, truck stop, or hotel breakfast nook, you can buy one Red Delicious and keep it around for a few months, secure in the knowledge that no one will be foolish enough to eat it. And the whole time it is not being eaten, you can advertise that you offer "fresh fruit".
Just look at your fruit at home. All that stuff gets eaten and replaced. If you go out on the road, the standard fruit basket becomes Red Delicious apples, small, hard oranges, and bananas--literally the three cheapest fruits you can buy in any grocery store. And the apples might as well be wooden apples, painted red, because when the bananas and oranges go, they remain.
Yes, we have the same list of go-tos. I've always called the subject of the article Red Undelicious. My dad always took one in his lunch so we always had Red undelicious around, but that only taught me I didn't like apples. Then one day I grew up and bought my own apples. There are so many to try.
I recently found a tree of unknown variety next to a Forest Service road in the mountains near me. I'm sure someone thew an apple core out the window many years ago. I had several people try them and all kinds of names were thrown out, but none of use could nail down what it was. Whatever it is, it is good!
Fujis are very nice but I notice that there is a lot more variance in their tartness level than in some other varieties. they tend to be on the sweet side, but some of them are much more tart than expected.
