Apple Spectrum
Apple Spectrum
[A mapping, showing types of apples. Each apple is in a bubble]

The comic shows a spectrum of different types of apples, with Red Delicious towards the bad end of the spectrum, and Honeycrisp towards the good end of the spectrum. Although most spectra are only one-dimensional, Granny Smith is on some side branch, implying that the taste is so different from the other two that it deserves its own category. (Granny Smith apples have a distinctively tart, or sour, flavor with a subtle sweetness, and is commonly used for cooking, as opposed to the other mentioned varieties that are quite sweet and primarily eaten raw.) Randall has previously shown his disdain for Red Delicious apples in footnote 1 in this what if ; he also ranked green apples as tastier than red apples in 388: Fuck Grapefruit .  The labeling of Red Delicious as "bad" compared to apples in general is perhaps unwarrantedly uncharitable; most apple trees produce fruit so bad that it is considered unfit for any purpose but fermentation.  On the rare occasions that a tree naturally produces palatable apples, it is grafted onto other trees so that they will produce more of its apples instead of their own--all Granny Smiths are genetically identical. For a long time, though, in the US apples were mainly divided into three sorts. In case of the Red Delicious apples the colour, not the taste was deemed most important to the buyers which (along with the genetic variability of Red Delicious) lead to many Red Delicious apples breeds that looked great, but actually tasted bad leading to a big restructuration of the apple market.
In the title text, Randall observes a common type of hypothetical question designed as a creative way to inquire about a person's preferences: If he were on a desert island with an unlimited access to something they like -- in this case, unlimited supply of any one type of apple -- what would he choose? However, Randall gives an unorthodox and unexpected answer to the typically playful hypothetical by taking it literally and questioning how such a situation would occur. How did he get stuck on the island, and how did he get a literally unlimited supply of apples? In reality, a desert island is unlikely to have an unlimited supply of any food [ citation needed ] , let alone apples.
[A mapping, showing types of apples. Each apple is in a bubble]
