In Praise of the Pear: My Low-Hanging Pledge for the Year

It’s been way too long since I last ate a pear, to the extent I can’t even remember what might have been my original issue with the fruit.

Advertisement

The best I can gather is that I appreciated a little bit more the rest of the ensemble inside those cans of fruit cocktail that my mom used to serve us — we were a Stokely family — in the 1970s. Yes, it has been a while.

But we’re going to change all of that in 2023, starting with this issue of American Fruit Grower, which includes an interesting story I wrote on the RNA targeting of pear psylla. Knowing I never made a New Year’s resolution, let’s run with pear appreciation as my goal for the remaining 10 months. It shouldn’t be difficult to accomplish. And there is precedent: My consumption of apples, blueberries, and pistachios has risen dramatically since joining the magazine three years ago.

Plus, I just watched an online presentation from Pear Day, the same Washington State University (WSU) Extension conference that had generated the pear psylla talk. At the very least, I’m up on my pear awareness now after listening to Karina Gallardo and Maria Montero, both representing WSU, review the results of their project on pear consumer preference testing (the principal investigators of which were Carolyn Ross of WSU and Ann Colonna from Oregon State University [OSU]).

A trained sensory panel organized the profiling of 23 pear varieties (11 summer, 12 winter). The pears — some commercially available, others still in testing — were critiqued by 219 consumers (107 summer, 112 winter) for appearance, aroma, taste, flavor, and texture.

Top Articles
Healthy Soils at Center of New $5 Million Initiative for California Citrus Growers

The summer varieties with the broadest appeal were proprietary brand ‘573’, ’Bartlett’, and ‘Seckel’, which satisfied 60% to 80% of all consumers. On the winter side, 75% of the consumers identified ‘Comice’ and ‘Paragon’ as the most appealing.

Among other consumer takeaways:

  1. They want pears that are flavorful, sweet, juicy, and ripe.
  2. The seven varieties that most exhibited these qualities were: ‘Paragon’, ‘Bartlett’, ‘Green Anjou’, ‘Concorde’, ‘Comice’, ‘573’, and ‘Seckel’.
  3. They don’t understand how to increase shelf life through refrigeration.
  4. They want to understand when their pears are ripe and don’t want to waste expensive fruit.
  5. Their willingness to pay is consistent with their liking scores for overall flavor.
  6. They consider farmers and universities to be highly trusted sources of information about food.
  7. They believe in-store sampling and food pairings/recipes could drive interest and increased purchases.

Great information across the board. I’m looking forward to applying my own tastes to these criteria. Considering the research took place in the Pacific Northwest, and I’m in Ohio, tracking down each of the top varieties will be half the fun.

If you have any thoughts on the WSU/OSU project or recommendations on pears in general, please write me at [email protected].

0