I Am Happily Plunging My Family Into Poverty Because of Honeycrisp Apples

I don’t have a large house, a Trunk Club membership, or student loans, but my children only eat Honeycrisp apples so it’s all sort of a wash.

If you’re familiar with Honeycrisp apples, you have tasted heaven in apple form, and you have learned, as I have, that all future fruit consumption will be a monstrous disappointment. If you aren’t familiar, congratulations! You and your savings account will be very happy together.

Honeycrisp apples are the fresh, plump varietal in the produce section under the sign labeled “Prohibitively Expensive Versions of Normal Food.” They are large. They are delicious. Unlike stupid dumb loser apples, which break as though you’re cutting into oatmeal, Honeycrisps, true to their name, crack in a crisp example of Nature’s Majestic Symmetry, like the crystals of a geode, their little droplets of juice-spray playing delightfully in the air.

If I sound prejudiced against other apples, it’s because I hate them. As far as I’m concerned, Honeycrisps are the only kind of apple in all of God’s appley creation, and the nation’s farmers could mass-chuck all the Red Delicious (not) and Jazz (inaccurate) and Gala (nothing could be less festive) and Jonagold (hard to pronounce) and Pink Ladies (a name that’s wrong twice) and especially Granny Smiths (please) into a crater in a landfill with the E.T. Atari cartridges and Obamacare repeal plans. In our house it’s Honeycrisp or nothing, which is a touch problematic because Honeycrisp apples retail for something like $300/lb., unless you get them at a Whole Foods, where the prices nudges up to $899.

Unlike stupid dumb loser apples, which break as though you’re cutting into oatmeal, Honeycrisps, true to their name, crack in a crisp example of Nature’s Majestic Symmetry

Honeycrisp apples are absolutely, hopelessly, and unchangeably our most luxurious grocery-based decision; to afford them I will gladly use shampoo as soap and brush my teeth with baking soda and cut way back on my cholesterol meds. And I stand by this very important proclamation for two reasons: 1. Holding fierce opinions about apples prevents me from reading the news and 2. They’re the only kind my kids will eat.

Now, as a grown man, I do realize that it’s possible to feed kids something other than the fancypants option, and that it’s generally bad precedent to let 5-year-olds dictate your grocery budget. This is legitimate point, and one I think about often while I’m ignoring it to buy my kids Honeycrisp apples.

Because here’s the thing: They eat them.

Here’s the other thing: They’re fruits.

Here’s the third thing: They are marvelous. They taste like angels would taste, if angels were apples. I can barely even look at other apples anymore. Other fruits are dead to me, including the really old ones in my fruit drawer, which in addition to being dead to me are actually dead. And it’s not just me: Things have reached

And it’s not just me: Things have reached point where my friend Ed and I — two grown and cheap adults who have known each other since Little League — send each other hyperventilating texts if we come across Honeycrisp sales at Kroger. One afternoon he found a pile of them for $1.99/lb. and we literally took it to believe the American economy had begun its inevitable collapse, which was not hugely unlikely. At some point, Ed and I will probably quit our jobs and begin selling apples out of the bed of a pickup off the exit to I-65, which, since I’m a writer, affords my children a much higher chance of attending college.

Honeycrisp apples are absolutely, hopelessly, and unchangeably our most luxurious grocery-based decision; to afford them I will gladly use shampoo as soap and brush my teeth with baking soda and cut way back on my cholesterol meds

Neither of us has the remotest problem with this, and if you’ve read this far, neither do you. If your child is picky, selective, or driven to subsist entirely on cheese sticks, single-serve yogurts, and assorted chicken parts and you stumble across a food that they’ll consume and won’t immediately result in their sprouting a donkey tail, you will likely feed it to them, and frankly there have been dinners when I wavered on the donkey-tail thing.

I don’t have stats on this, but I figure 100 percent of parents, and a higher percentage of those on the Internet, report embarking on parenthood with wildly ambitious nutrition goals, proclaiming that they’ll only nourish their unspoilt progeny with organic, GMO-free grass-fed foods sourced from the Garden of Eden, only to reach a point somewhere in the first 24 months where that ambition evolves into a lunch comprised of whatever Life Savers fell on the floor last. (It is this initiative which once compelled me, for several full months, to serve my son an unruly cereal-based mixture called CocoaLuckyTrix, which of course he invented. You cannot believe the weird color it turned the milk.)

In short, we’ve stumbled across a reliable Source of Fruit, and we’re sticking with it. Sure, it’s bad precedent to let your kids dictate your grocery decisions, but on the other hand, they do that anyway. This is a small, accidental vitamin-packed parenting win that I can offset by cutting back on coffee and pizza rolls. And movies. And, y’know, gas for the car. Such is adult life: Expectation is a mighty thing, but compromise is mightier. It’s a good point. Ed and I agree on it wholeheartedly.