‘This disgusting, red, beautiful fruit.’ →
At the supermarket near his home in central Virginia, Tom Burford likes to loiter by the display of Red Delicious. He waits until he spots a store manager. Then he picks up one of the glossy apples and, with a flourish, scrapes his fingernail into the wax: T-O-M.
“We can’t sell that now,” the manager protests.
To which Burford replies, in his soft Piedmont drawl: “That’s my point.”
Burford, who is 79 years old, is disinclined to apple destruction. His ancestors scattered apple seeds in the Blue Ridge foothills as far back as 1713, and he grew up with more than 100 types of trees in his backyard orchard. He is the author of Apples of North America, an encyclopedia of heirloom varieties, and travels the country lecturing on horticulture and nursery design. But his preservationist tendencies stop short of the Red Delicious and what he calls the “ramming down the throats of American consumers this disgusting, red, beautiful fruit.”
As we all begin our yearly autumnal pilgrimage to pay way more for apples (and cider doughnuts, and kettle corn, and lemonade, and funnel cake, and pizza, and turkey legs) than we ever would in the supermarket, please treat the above piece as a PSA. Help stop the scourge of the Red Delicious!