ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the destructive drive for aesthetic idealism that underlies the commodification of produce, and the tension it creates can be considered a feature of modern food systems. Redness in apples interacts with the human body. In the market, size and colour are the main ways to separate apples into price categories, and differentiating price. From the luminous apple that supplied Snow White with a dose of poison, to the apple that commonly illustrates the eviction from Eden, red apples have been culturally propagated as an idealized form of the fruit. The original Red Delicious apple was actually called the Hawkeye and found on a farm in Iowa in 1872. The chapter discusses the ways that the construction of redness as a pure commodity aesthetic symbolizes anxieties about the reach of the power of the market. It describes how the maintenance of some contextual resistance to wholesale redness generates an important competitive dynamic among apple producers.
