I think they're bred mostly to sit in a bowl in someone's kitchen. The fact that they taste terrible is a bonus because you don't want kids eating your table centerpiece.

What's ironic about that is that when I bought my first such apple, I thought it must have been old as it was so mealy.

What you're saying makes a lot of sense though. I equally remember having a loaf of square bread that comes in plastic (called 'toast bread' in a lot of Europe) lying around for over a month and I could not spot any mould and it was also still soft. It did not taste like 'real' bread even when fresh of course...

US agriculture is seasonal and overproduces, a lot of the excess is stored for months in cold houses and sold over the course of the year. Your apple you just bought could very well be nearly a year old. This is why I've been moving to farmers markets. That's where the flavor is.

Those are probably treated for remain 'indefinitely fresh'. Is a little dirt secret from apple markets. Is not genetics, is vegetable hormones sprayed on the skin. Just avoid them.

> They were optimized for apple sellers not apple eaters.

The American food industry is optimised for sellers, not eaters [1].

It is that way because the scalar nature of capital in America favours national businesses, not local businesses (or nutritional well being).

Consumers fit in with this model out of necessity because they are workers who cannot allocate enough time to food shopping, preparation, and cooking. Instead, they minimise the time spent on food procurement by going to the supermarket, which is the ultimate expression of scalar capitalism.

[1] Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us ISBN1400069807 (ISBN13: 9781400069804), Michael Moss, Random House, 2013

oh absolutely and it is all most economically optimal and rational thing to do for everyone involved. It is just soulless and dismal. each step of the way is rational in isolation, its when it all together that it becomes an awful abomination .