Big Apple

What is happening to apples?

I have 4 apple trees which give me 6 varieties of apples.
I only recently discovered you can graft several different apple-tree-branches on one trunk.
This means you can avoid, or diminish, the perpetual plague of gardening – you have nothing, then you have too much of something, then you have nothing again.
You may not actually avoid a glut of apples, but at least you can introduce more variety into the glut that you somehow feel you should eat, so it is not so boring.

I deliberately don't thin my apples very much, so I end up with lots of apples around 80 gm each.
When I fancy an apple, that is about as much apple as I fancy.
I enjoy all of it.

But when we buy apples in the shops, they are all enormous.
Around 220 gm.
More than anybody would really choose to eat in one go?
You are tired of apples before you get to the end of one apple.
We have to negotiate before cutting an apple, to see if there are enough volunteers to eat it all.
Or cling-wrap some of it in the fridge for another day.

What market mechanism, or consumer conditioning, or genetic jiggery-pokery is causing this drift to gigantic apples?

How can we stop it?

Parting thot: “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” – George Bernard Shaw