Fascinating article in Aeon magazine by Jill Neimark, exploring the role of specific, older varieties in the experience of taste. I won’t steal her thunder here, just urge you to read it. I will, however, cavil at one statement:
All commercial apples, including Granny Smiths, have been hybridised to a sugary monotone.
That’s simply not true, unless hybridised means something else in Georgia.
If they’re called Granny Smith, their genetics should be the same. If they taste dreadful from the supermarket, and astonishing picked up from a roadside stand “by a white-frame house on a curving, shady lane by Lake Allatoona,” that’s the result of nurture, not nature.
But please ignore my quibbles — and I have others — unless you agree that sometimes accuracy matters.