Inventing Fruit

Inventing fruit. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Fruit Grower Report.

A trip to the fresh fruit section of your grocer can often times cause a consumer to stand and scratch their heads over the dizzying array of choices. In times past, you simply chose from a selection of peaches, apples, plums, apricots or others. It was fairly easy and straight forward. But today, the line has been blurred. Not only do you find a wide range of varieties such as Jonathan, golden, Honey Crisp, Fuji and Cameo to name a few apple varieties but now there are crossbred with a completely different kind of fruit to make a new variety or hybrid. These hybrids are accomplished by taking the pollen of one fruit and pollinating the flower of another. The process can take years before a new variety emerges but emerge they do. Hybrid fruit now makes up about 100 million dollars of the annual fruit business in the U.S. Some consumers just love the exotic kinds of produce while others prefer things the way they were.

AUDIO: Just a simple apricot is fine with me.

Why create a new variety? There are lots of reasons. Disease resistance, taste, climate changes, shelf-life and of course just plain novelty. Some new varieties are slowly making their way in to establishing their own place in the produce aisles, like the pluot, a hybrid between a plum and an apricot. They are now widely available in supermarkets and may soon be joined by other hybrids like the aprium, plumcote or the peacotum.

That’s today’s Fruit Grower Report. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.