[bsk26]

We had a bunch of apple trees when I was a kid, including a red delicious tree that was probably planted in the 1920s. Its apples were my favorite, especially when they became crisp and sweet after a light frost. Perhaps store bought red delicious suck but I think this hate is just misplaced elitism from people who've never had one off the tree.

[maxerickson]

How is it elitism to say that the 99% of the variety that people actually eat suck?

I would think the elitism is insisting that the only way to truly judge them is straight off the tree (after a spell of opportunistic weather).

[bsk26]

I guess that's exactly why I thought it was a bit snobby ... internet folks trashing the preferences of 99 percent of the population.

Having a tree is pretty hard where I live now but pretty normal back in the Midwest.

[wordupmaking]

That makes it even more important to point it out. Most people would otherwise have no clue there's anything to miss out on. As some people above said, making their own apple sauce made "store bought inedible". The flip side of that is, to make cheaply and badly mass produced things sell, people can't know good things. Once stuff is gone and purged from the archives, it's gone. The feelings of anyone who happens to be around currently, including ourselves, are not even a matter compared to the dangers of that.

We can't remain at the point where our problems with coping with emotions restrict our intellectual movements. This isn't asking anyone to run 50000 miles, or go a week without sleep or a year without food, it's just saying "this thing you think is good is actually kind of shit, and if you knew this actually good thing that would be immediately obvious to you, please don't die now". And while most people (including me) can't have a tree, everybody but the very poorest could save up some money to buy just one "real" apple to at least confirm this. Or maybe buy two, and give one to a poor person, just so they know how bad the apples they sometimes eat are. And then the question is "what does this mean, how can this be improved", etc., and not "how do I live with this blow to my ego". Please, don't take this as me being upset at your comment at all, it triggered me, you could say. I read Fahrenheit 451 recently and since then every HN discussion has aspects that remind me of it.

If people didn't personally identify so much with what they know and do etc., there wouldn't even be any hurt feelings to overcome, but I'm not even going there. Let's assume it's real offensive to be corrected or put down a peg: yes, and, so, what? That should motivate us to head off others at the pass, and to smoothly inspect their lessons and take them on board without blinking should they have merit, to become good at it, instead of attempting to ban it.

> internet folks trashing the preferences of 99 percent of the population

vs. article:

> His words contain the paradox of the Red Delicious: alluring yet undesirable, the most produced and arguably the least popular apple in the United States. It lurks in desolation. Bumped around the bottom of lunch bags as schoolchildren rummage for chips or shrink-wrapped Rice Krispies treats.

Maybe it's a bit rich coming from me after going on such tangents, but still, it takes some mental gymnastics to turn complaints about "ramming [these apples] down the throats of American consumers" into "being a snob for thinking lowly of people for liking these apples so much". No, everybody would be able to tell the huge difference, but as you said, most people don't get the chance. That's the problem, not the solution.

[throwanem]

They might be a mouthful of orgasms when eaten right off the tree. The ones in the supermarket are still made of open-cell foam and disappointment.

[dragonwriter]

> Perhaps store bought red delicious suck but I think this hate is just misplaced elitism from people who've never had one off the tree.

I've had Red Delicious both directly off the tree and reasonably fresh from the farm, and they are, in either of those cases, generally far better than from the supermarket, true.

Even so, they aren't now as good as I remember them—even from the supermarket—from 30-35 years ago (they seem to be on average a lot more mealy now), and, even back then they were a middling variety for eating without preparation, and not particularly outstanding for any preparation I can think of.

[Justin_K]

It's not elitism - the problem is virtually nobody has access to the quality of apples you did. Generally speaking, we are limited to what is at the store, and they taste like shit.

[colordrops]

Having a tree to have fresh apples is a bit more elite than most of us that have to buy them from the store...

[throwanem]

Shouldn't think so, at least not of necessity. I lived next to a small apple orchard for a while as a kid, and in a tumbledown hovel with chipboard walls at that; the trees belonged to the same farmer who rented us the place, who certainly wasn't any more a member of any elite anywhere than we ourselves were.

[mikeash]

Privilege comes in many different forms. 90% of the population doesn't have that kind of access.

[throwanem]

Yeah, it was a real privilege for a kid and his single mom to be living well below the poverty line in a three-room shack that any half-awake inspector would've immediately condemned - not least for the black mold that ate up one whole wall of the third room so we had to seal it off with plastic - because it happened to sit on a hill next to a tiny patch of half-gone-to-seed apple trees that produced maybe as much as a half bushel in a season, the whole being owned by a former truck farmer whose income consisted in no inconsiderable part of the pitiful rent he got for the place, and who barely afforded the property taxes that left unpaid would've had the lot of us indigent.

I understand that the rhetoric of privilege isn't intended as personal attack, or at least that that's not its ostensible intent. I wish more people who favored it understood that, however intended, personal attack is the way it comes across, and that makes it unhelpful - indeed, actively harmful, if the purpose is to promote sympathy, among those not so predisposed, for those philosophies in whose service the rhetoric is invariably deployed.

[mikeash]

The fact that your life sucked in many other ways is irrelevant. Having fresh fruit growing on plants near your house which you can eat is a privilege that most people do not have.

I'm not saying, "your life was privileged, and you suck." I'm saying, "your situation of having fresh-off-the-tree apples was an unusual privilege." Am I wrong, or do you just object to the one word, and want me to know a bunch of other things about how you lived too?

[throwanem]

To reiterate from my prior comment, I understand exactly what you're saying. The problem I have is that you're not listening to what I'm saying - which, again, is that it doesn't matter what you're saying, because when you use this rhetoric to express it, you piss people off even if in spite of yourself, and the rhetoric is therefore actively inimical to the purpose in whose service you employ it.

It's not that complicated or controversial a point, or at least I wouldn't have thought so - that, when attempting to communicate, the intent with which you speak is irrelevant to the effect your words produce in your interlocutor. Unless your intent is actually to piss people off - and I see no reason to suspect that it is - then using a rhetorical structure which consistently produces that effect is counterproductive. If your intent is to inspire sympathy for the contention that there's something "elite" about having access to fresh apples, regardless of any surrounding circumstance, then using a rhetorical structure which consistently antagonizes people, and thus is much more likely to depress the tendency to sympathy among the already unconvinced than to inspire it, is counterproductive as well. And arguing that those whom you so anger and antagonize, are in the wrong to feel so, only compounds the error.

It's not that I fail to understand the concept - I expect I should do, considering I deployed it often enough myself back in my doctrinaire-progressive youth. And it's not that I fail to grasp that your intent is not to give insult - even if my own experience could not inform me on the other side of the question, mere charity would require I not so presume.

The problem I have is, quite simply, that the rhetoric you are using, in any case save when talking to someone who already agrees with you in every meaningful particular, does not work. Outside that very specific internecine context, the only thing it achieves is to make people angry, and that helps nothing and nobody as far as I can see.

[koverstreet]

Crying "privilege!" anytime someone has something you don't doesn't add a whole lot to the discussion.

[logfromblammo]

Substitute "tenement apartment" for "shack" and "slumlord" for "former truck farmer", then subtract "living near formerly productive fruit trees". You now have a story that describes many times more people than your original.

The politics of privilege basically says that unless you have had the worst life that it is possible to have, you have to yield to anyone that had anything worse off than you. Since the word "elitism" is what brought all that into the conversation, perhaps it was a poor choice.

While at previous times in history, it might have been a mark of elite privilege to not have to pick your own fresh produce, that is no longer the case. Now, having fruit trees and a garden in your backyard means you are lucky enough to have direct control over a portion of your food supply, and can therefore choose to grow food with flavor and nutrition, rather than superior shelf life, visual appeal, and transportability--which are the characteristics that the grocery store will choose for you.

The apples that grew in my (rented) backyard as a kid were sour, with a woody texture, and were usually covered in wasps or ants. But they certainly did taste better than store-bought Red Delicious. The ants added a lemony flavor. I never thought to try the wasps.