The Red Delicious is an apple atrocity. Why are we growing billions of pounds of them each year?

“Red Delicious is the gateway apple,” Reinholt says, the apple that hooks countries on American-grown fruit. Today, over half of our Red Delicious crop is exported, leaving roughly 580 million pounds of the apples to be eaten in this country. This global demand has been a boon for orchardists who began production long ago. The Red Delicious may not be making growers rich but it is providing a necessary entrée into countries that want a taste of Washington apples.

Most of our Red Delicious apples wind up in Mexico, India, Indonesia, China, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates. Many of these markets have unsophisticated supply chains, where product can wait in ports for days, or be left to sit in holding areas without temperature control. Paul McCarthy, assistant manager for Northwest Fruit Exporters, says that it can take 15 to 21 days for an apple to ship from Seattle to China—an arduous journey best undertaken by a hearty, low-maintenance fruit.

At the same time, the cheap price of Red Delicious makes the fruit especially desirable in markets with low average incomes. The variety tends to cost less for several reasons. First, soft domestic demand has tanked price and they tend to be grown on older trees, with the startup costs long since paid off. Also, their production doesn’t include the “club fees” charged to orchards growing newer, proprietary strains like the Honeycrisp, since the Delicious variety was developed almost a century ago.

Still, O’Rourke feels that as incomes rise in those countries, people will likely turn away from the Red Delicious just as we did. In China, for instance, where the color red is associated with luck and prosperity, the apple’s looks have long made the Red Delicious desirable. But that’s already starting to change, according to Public Radio International. Though less than a decade ago many Chinese consumers were still buying with their eyes, more recently taste has become a bigger factor in this market. “Products go in and out of fashion,” O’Rourke says.

Red Delicious represents a full 35 percent of Oneonta’s apple production even though Reinholt says he’s slowly cutting back. “We are reducing our volume of Red Delicious every year,” he says. That’s the tricky thing about being in the apple business: Trees take years to grow and change is often glacial. But consumer appetites can shift almost overnight.

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For now, Americans still manage to choke down billions of Red Delicious apples annually. The question is, who’s buying?

We’re choosing them at the supermarket less often, and the Gala now reigns supreme as the nation’s favorite apple, according to the U.S. Apple Association. While the Kroger grocery chain says it still carries Red Delicious, spokesperson Kristal Howard acknowledges that the apples “have declined in popularity with our customers.”

Increasingly, then, the Red Delicious is served in institutions where people have little choice about what they’re eating. It’s the official apple of the captive audience.

“The three most commonly served fruits are apples, oranges, and bananas,” says Carol Chong, national nutrition advisor for Alliance for a Healthier Generation’s Healthy Schools Program. In schools and cafeterias she visits throughout country, “typically it’s Red Delicious apples” being served, she says. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that Red Delicious is the apple of choice in schools, hospitals, hotels, and even food banks throughout the country, though it’s hard to say definitively if that’s true. Not all institutions keep data on how much of each food they get, and none of the data differentiate between types of apples.

At Baldor, the Northeast’s largest produce and specialty food distributor, Red Delicious may be the second most popular apple variety—but American consumers aren’t buying them directly. The bulk of them go to hospitals, “then schools and hotel chains,” says Ben Walker, senior director of marketing and development. “They’re less popular with our retail and food service clients.”

Regular buyers of the Red Delicious tend not to be known for culinary prowess. They are more often places that want a raw ingredient at low cost and high volume.

When Red Delicious growers can’t find customers among the public, in other words, they can often rely on the U.S. government. When even that fails, growers and distributors can always give unsold apples away for free in exchange for tax credits. Myrna Jensen, a marketing and communications associate at the Oregon Food Bank (OFB), which coordinates food deliveries to 21 regional food banks and more than 1,200 food assistance sites within the state, says that the charity gets a lot of produce that way. “We take what the growers want to give us,” she says. Last year, OFB received 50 truckloads of apples—or two million pounds—in donations. The fact that the Delicious still makes up roughly 30 percent of the Washington apple crop means that a lot of those pounds had a dark red skin and a not-so-delicious taste.

“I’ve not really had a great tasting Red Delicious,” Jensen personally concedes. But the food assistance system is often forced to traffic in whatever’s left unsold, and the Red Delicious is frequently the last apple standing.

Reviled, rejected, and refused across the country, the Red Delicious has found its purpose as the apple people eat when they can’t choose or afford anything else. It might not be a glamorous position but it’s an important one nonetheless. Unlike a lot of fresh produce, these apples have a months-long shelf life and can be a healthful food in places where grocery shelves have few other fresh foods to choose from.

You might not like the taste, but the fruit’s durability, high volume, and low price tend to be too powerful to ignore. And don’t forget to keep the Red Delicious in mind next time you need an apple for your holiday wreath.