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The improvements in fruit over the years has improved my quality of life so much. If you have never tried a sumo citrus, I recommend it -- they are only in season till April iirc.

Benefits of sumo citrus: Easy to peel Pith does not remain attached to orange Super juicy Excellent taste and texture, balanced acid and sugar levels.

https://archive.is/wBogT

It is always a good time of year then they come along. I have had WAY too many of them but thats not going to stop me from having many more.
Funny enough I was eating a Sumo as I came across your comment. They are certainly very tasty, but for the price (which is high at least here in Ohio) I much prefer the tartness of a traditional in-season California satsuma.
Similarly, the Tango variety is becoming more commercially available. It has a zipper peel, seedless, and outstanding flavor. It's usually marketed as "Mandarin", though. You kind of have to know what it looks like to be able to tell what's a clementine or not.

Others to watch out for are Gold Nugget (my favorite, but I very rarely see them at the store), and I also saw Kishu at the grocery store for the first time this year.

I love fruits and vegetables, and am excited about this! That said, I do worry long-term about changes to increase sugar content. Sure it’s delicious, but I think it’s almost strictly worse for me. If only the high-sugar items sell, it will become harder to find low-sugar items. Not to mention the amount of self-control that will be required.
One thing I love about low-sugar citrus is the ability for it to not spike my sugar levels.

I use Miracle Fruit extract which alters the taste buds temporarily to turn sour flavors into sweet flavors. I can eat an entire lime and it tastes like sweet candy, with no real sugar content. No artificial sweetening either.

I wish they'd sell old varieties of apples. The new ones all insist of having Red Delicious (so called) as part of the genetic makeup. It does not impart a good flavor. There are all these nice old ones, like Cortland and Winesap, but you can't get them anywhere.
Cosmic crisp seems very commonly available(at least, here in colorado) and has a great taste and texture with no red delicious genes present
I’d like to see a citation - I’m not sure this Red Delicious assertion is true.
Depends on where you are maybe? Cortland is still readily available here (Quebec). Hope it stays that way, I'm feeling slightly worried. Seems like the trend of trademarked new apple varieties has not quite caught up here yet as orchards are not interested in replacing tried and true stocks.
There's an apple orchard that sells at the farmers market in my city with >40 seasonal varieties, most of which you'd never see at a supermarket. Apples grow well in a lot of the US, its worth looking for local options
In Sweden and I think Europe, there seems to be quite much product development in apples. I think one of the reasons is that storage seems to have been more or less perfected so that the produce can be sold over almost a whole year.

Using only traditional methods there are several "new" Swedish varieties, Aroma, Frida and Saga that are very nice - and especially Saga is absolutely fantastic - On par or better that international varieties Jazz, Pink Lady and Honeycrisp.

Some of the more traditional varieties are also sold more and for a longer period because of the improved storage, even though that I think they have a shorter storage window.

I always feel personally attacked when people bad-mouth (ha) the Red Delicious. It's true that many are this mealy disaster -- but I think that's a product of crappy long cellar times and trying to get money for 'old' apples. If you get a good fresh one, it should be the right level of tart, sweet, crisp, and juicy. And when they are good, they are probably my favorite. It's just so damn hard to get the good ones and no great ways to tell if they're good before biting in.
Because golden delicious and red delicious were everywhere in the 90's and spontaneous hybridization is a very, very low success rate.

Ambrosia apples appear to be a spontaneous cross of grandchildren of Golden and Red delicious apples.

I don't really care if my food is GMO as much as I worry about nutrient content being reduced to cut costs.

What is the incentive here?

I don't want to live in a world where fruit is bastardized into candy, meat is missing amino acids in the protein, and everyone has fucking diabetes as a result and dies at 40.

We don't even need gene editing to have seen this game played before. It happened throughout the previous century. Look at the history of iceberg lettuce and other watery slop like cheap tomatoes.

My GMO concerns are all centered around the vulnerability of monoculture crops. Having a variety seems to make the food supply more resilient.
There's some compelling reasoning that dwarfism to maximize produce size has contributed substantially to the reduction in nutrients.

Because when the tree fruits, it pulls nutrients out of the rest of the plant. And if there's less plant, then you get produce that's more water and carbon and less nutrient.

Faced with a full-length pop-up saying they care about my privacy just made me think, "if you cared about my privacy, you wouldn't track me and therefore wouldn't need ny consent for anything"
They bury the "Reject" button behind two clicks too.
The Economist tries hard to normalize GMO food, without ever raising the issues and addressing them.

Whatever one thinks of that issue, this technique is deception: It decieves people into thinking that it's normal, that there are no issues; it makes it easy to just follow, hard to question. People follow norms, and that's how you convice them to put aside their concerns.

> Over thousands of years of domestication, humans have moulded fruit to their liking. ... As Pairwise’s blackberries and cherries show, advances in gene editing are allowing fruits to be altered in new ways. crispr, the most popular such technique at the moment ...

> The European Union’s Parliament and Council, the bloc’s governing body, reached a provisional deal in December to “simplify” the process for marketing plants bred through new genomic techniques, such as by scrapping the need to label them any differently from conventional ones. That seems an appropriately fruitful approach.

But there is this interesting tidbit, purely from the money-making perspective:

> ... unlike existing genetically modified crops, those made using crispr do not require dna from a foreign organism to be inserted—a practice that experience shows puts customers off.

Your comment presupposes the benefits of GMO agriculture are outweighed by the costs. If we make assertions, we should back them up.
>Whatever one thinks of that issue, this technique is deception: It decieves people into thinking that it's normal, that there are no issues; it makes it easy to just follow, hard to question. People follow norms, and that's how you convice them to put aside their concerns.

Should every article about vaccines also include a disclaimer about how some people think they cause autism?

> The Economist tries hard to normalize GMO food, without ever raising the issues and addressing them.

And you also did not raise any issue, just asserted that there are some. GMO is amazing.

I could agree to a point, the most commonly planted GMO crops are Roundup-Ready grains and soy, which encourage spraying even more atrazine on fields[1]. That does of course also mean increased yields, but the tradeoff is not unambiguously good. However the varieties discussed in this article clearly don't have that problem, knocking out genes to emphasize desirable characteristics seems much more appealing, though I suppose I'd rather see increasing nutrient density over making seeds less chewy, even if that meant adding DNA from other plants[2].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_tomato#Biotechnology

Glad I live where growing this unnecessary genetically engineered shit is illegal. Patents on food shouldn't exist.
one thing I don't like about fruits nowadays is that they're too sweet, I don't remember grape being so sweets when I was younger for example, it's like eating sugary water.
Label the fruit as a gmo and the market for them collapses. Which is why we're not allowed to have clear stickers at the store.
New cultivars are kinda screwing up classic canning recipes because a common change is more neutral pH, which makes them more susceptible to decay organisms.

Honeycrisps and red Fuji are pretty high.

I have no doubt that blackberries will go this direction because it's annoying to get seeds stuck in your teeth. On the other hand, compare the fiber of blackberries (8g in one cup) to modern grapes (1g in one cup).