I run a nonprofit group that maintains a similar but different database, ours focuses on identification of heritage varieties, I.e. apples that existed pre WWII. We're in the PNW so we also have catalogs of where they were sold to make their way to us, etc, as we identify trees in old orchards.
I've learned some interesting stuff along the way, like that English varieties keep showing up in eastern Washington because English nurseries shipped to Vancouver in the late 1800s.
Our apple database is here: https://heritageapplecorps.org/varieties/
I used to work for some growers on various bits of custom systems and some of those fruit names were their big sellers.
https://www.seriouseats.com/how-honeycrisp-apples-went-from-...
Consumers want the same fruit all year round even though growing fruit(or any plant/vegetable) is very region & season specific.
Growers are big cargo cultists when they see a particular crop getting attention they all rush in. The past 5 years has seen record planting of avocado crops in Australia that now the growers either rip them out or have to sell the farm.
Just enjoy a delicious tasty snack in the appropriate season, and if it’s not on the shelf when you go to the shop then find another in season delicious tasty snack.
I wonder if there is a way to report issues. We have several apple trees of different varieties, and as I was playing around with the harvest period calculator, I entered the peak harvest of one of our later ripening varieties, and asked it to calculate the harvest time for our earliest ripening variety. It told me that peak harvest would be in December. It's actually (as the description for the variety notes) in June/July. So either there is an issue in the harvest period for that variety, or else the calculator is messing up somehow.
The site is caught in something of a bind as to its name. "Pomiferous" isn't correctly formed; it means "fruit-bearing", because Latin pomum refers to all fruit equally.
The word for an apple is malum. But in an English-speaking context, that will tend to confuse people over similarity to the word for evil, which is... malum [compare "malevolent"]. (In Latin, the word for "apple" has a long A, while the word for "evil" has a short A, but this is not a distinction we can draw in English.)
-logy is a Greek-derived suffix and you'd want a Greek root. For apples, the ancient Greek word appears to be "melon", so your word would be "melology".
Apples have not, and I think that's great.
Is this because other fruit varietals are generally not significantly different? Is there some special sauce behind apple distribution?
Sorry, couldn't resist.
I use this site for many years: https://www.orangepippin.com
"Slightly hotter than a Jalapeno" means very little when a Jalapeno is anywhere from 3,000 scoville to 60,000 scoville.
All of those you mentioned can be grown in Europe, except bananas that are shipped from South America and arrive in good condition despite the long travel. Many other tropical fruits may be too fragile or expensive to transport at scale.
I remember reading an article about banana import and it's a surprisingly complex process involving a lot of R&D to get to where we are today.
apples have spread from Kazakhstan in their thousands of varieties adapted to climates from cool to frigid (the original liked the slopes of a breezy river valley.)
So since the colonies in North America, you could easily have an apple grove. If you were fancy, you bought imported cultivars from Stark Bros, see Thos Jefferson.
In the United States, the #1 beverage until Coca-Cola was apple cider. Lots of factors there.
It's kinda like saying "why is France so focused on wine?" Or California! But if you go to California, it's apricots, almonds, peaches plums pears persimmon blackberry blueberry boysenberry which have all got shorter shelf-life and season.
It's really quite unfortunate because the overabundance of apples and oranges means that nobody cares about the local seasonal fruits and they risk going extinct.
