Why do so many fruits have seedless varieties but the apple and cherry do not?
In: 219
We do, in fact, have some varieties of seedless apples. They just aren’t very popular. There are two main problems:
First, even if the apple is seedless, it’s still going to have a core, and people still aren’t going to want to eat the core. So making it seedless isn’t super profitable. (This problem is even more pronounced in cherries: it’s not the seed that people object to, but rather the stone around the seed.)
Second, apples are notoriously hard to breed. The children are nothing like their parents. Basically each tree we plant is a new roll of the dice. The odds that a mutant seedless apple will *also* have other desirable properties like “has at least a hint of sweetness” and “is not a crabapple” are low.
I think the Romans might have had a decent seedless apple at one point, but, if so, it went the way of the *silphium*.
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