The John McPhee article that the author references was expanded into a book, and it's a great read for anyone that finds this story interesting: https://www.amazon.com/Oranges-John-McPhee-ebook/dp/B005E8AN...
John McPhee is a great underrated non-fiction author, up there with the late Tracy Kidder. I particularly like McPhee's "The Curve of Binding Energy" about the physicist Theodore B. Taylor.
Seconded. Interesting read.
This reminds me of the collapse of the Gros Michel banana variety, also due to disease. Near-100% loss of a food crop, even a luxury one, is an alarming thing to see though.
(I was wondering if climate change would be mentioned, but that doesn't seem to be critical there yet. Starting to be noticed in European grape terroir.)
They mention it as a critical factor, the disease is spread by insects, which is spread by hurricanes. The areas they grow the oranges never used to get hurricanes.
> Hurricanes turned out to be a vector for spreading the little winged bug. The wind carried the psyllid all over the state, dropping it off in hundreds of thousands of acres of groves.
> It was the perfect storm. And then, of course, there were the actual perfect storms, the high-caliber hurricanes that, before climate change, didn’t come to the Ridge: Irma, Ian, Milton, massive cells, all direct hits on the groves.
>The areas they grow the oranges never used to get hurricanes.
That's not correct: we have good data going back to 1851:
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.htm...
Search for "FL": hurricanes have been hitting Florida frequently for the last 175 years.
That's not the point being made: the article clearly states that those areas did not previously get hit by storms at this level. Climate change is making hurricanes stronger and wetter, so even though they've been a phenomenon for as long as humans have lived there that doesn't mean that the frequency of damaging storms over an area can't change in a way which makes it worse for agriculture. There's an inflation-adjusted list of weather events which caused the equivalent of a billion dollars or more in damages, and the upward trend is pretty clear — it's like dismissing the impact of the machine gun because people used to have long rifles.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/state-summary/FL
You get a similar problem with saltwater intrusion where, yes, it's never not been a phenomenon but now it's affecting a lot more people than it used to:
https://southeastfloridaclimatecompact.org/initiative/climat...
Hurricanes do more dollars in damage because we're richer and there's more capital near the coast.
The idea that climate change caused hurricanes which spread insects is not impossible but seems unlikely. I don't think the statistical methods exist to prove it.
Do you really believe parts of Florida never got hurricanes until recently?
To be charitable, they merely pointed out what the article said, even if it is obviously, objectively false.
Or the death of the American Chestnut the generation before, once so common its causually in a Christmas song, now all but gone.
Did this banana have seeds!? I've never seen one, but it looks awful. They were actually good?
Most edible bananas are seedless and most cultivars (human grown) bananas are genetic mutants with triploid chromosomes (though a few are tetrapolid or diploid). Getting them to produce functional reproductive structures at all let alone viable seeds is very difficult. There are ongoing efforts to cross-breed with their wild cousins and to preserve genetic diversity.
No, it didn't have seeds either.
Have you ever had "banana flavor" candy that doesn't really taste like bananas? The flavoring is Isoamyl acetate, and I've heard suggestion that people called it banana flavor because it tasted more like Gros Michel. After switching to Cavendish banana the flavor name no longer made as much sense. Not sure how true it is though.
Someone in the thread linked to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9ZtvpBoXzI, where Hank Green tells this same story... and tries a Gros Michel banana and says it doesn't taste like "banana flavor"
I had them. They are wonderful, and even creamy.
I still love tiny red bananas though, they are so sweet!
I never had one, but apperently they tasted much better then the current variety (which IIRC, is in danger of suffering the same fate)
IIRC, there was actually a huge marketing push because people wouldn't each the current variety ?
PS - the old one didn't go 100% extinct, and you can get small numbers of them from specialty growers. Youtube has videos of people trying them (1)
My great uncle got busted for peyote during the Canker Wars because Florida was going around to all the known growers and greenhouses looking for canker. Charges were dropped because they didn’t have a warrant. He also grew legitimate plants.
He sounds like a great uncle!
He fought in WW2 but by the time I knew him his mind was gone mostly due to PTSD. I miss my great aunt and uncle
Potentially.
I just want to proudly, but also sadly, boast that Polk county once produced more oranges than the entire state of California.
Florida was a beautiful place not long ago, but a very peculiar and aggressively anti indigenous development is redefining it daily. Things have become so strange that squalid retention ponds qualify as wetland restoration.
I could rant for a while, but won't. Sarasota once produced more celery than possibly all states combined, and that helped us get through the Depression locally. But we sure did grow some oranges, and how wonderful the scent of orange blossoms are. It's something to behold.
Meta: giving oranges as gifts at Christmas was a bit of a thing in the past when they used to be much more rare during winter: from Valencia/Ivrea for Europeans, and California/Florida in the US.
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-we-should-br...
In the US the Interstate system helped reduce shipping and logistic costs across state lines, and so oranges became more prevalent and less 'special' post-WW2.
They also had a wild system for growing citrus fruit in trenches in the USSR.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cul...
I've always wanted to try it in my own cold environment.
There are (were?) also dedicated "juice trains" running from Florida to various destinations.
Also the passenger train immortalized by Johnny Cash's "Orange Blossom Special": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWz5NzY3Zck
Tangerines (or satsumas) over Christmas were a treat in the north of England when I was a kid.
Granny Smith and Pink Lady were also considered treats when it came to apples, compared to the usual golden delicious or braeburn.
Fascinating story. I wonder how much the earlier pesticides contributed to the problem. The story mentions it as a thing that was passing, and it makes me curious what would have happened without the pesticides.
I'm also curious whether the bugs would survive if you cut down every orange tree in Florida, waited a couple of years, and then planted new groves.
The Florida Orange was NEVER the Florida Orange to begin with.
Of note from the story: "...because it came from China, where oranges also came from in the first place." Technically yes but also no, what we have for the modern navel orange came from a mutation that happened in Brazil in the 1800s - 200 years after its introduction from China. The parent trees for literally the entire navel orange (aka Florida aka Sunkist orange) industry are in Riverside, CA, I see them every day driving to work. The now-deceased Queen of England used to get two boxes of oranges from those very trees every year.
Makes the disease even more confounding, as one would assume that orange trees evolved alongside it. Normally invasives are destructive because the species has never seen it before.
Citrus greening wasn't documented in Asia until the early 1900s so it's possible they didn't evolve alongside it.
Sugarcane and pineapple used to be the biggest agricultural products in Hawaii. Now they're gone.
What caused this in Hawaii?
Sugar cane required annual burning of the fields, which became really unpopular. That and labor practices.
They still grow millions of pineapples
IIRC for sugar it's because of cheaper cane sugar substitutes (corn syrup and sugar beets) out-competing the cane sugar grown in Hawaii.
So, market conditions then, and not some kind of blight or parasite? Wasn't sure.
Sugarcane was due to cheaper sources. Pineapples I think was due to economic factors as well. Basically, one of the most isolated population centers in the world adds a lot of cost due to shipping things in and out and being a US state imposes means that labor isn't going to be dirt cheap.
Also Jones Act: ships from Asia can't pick up cargo from Hawaii on the way and drop it in mainland US. This means that shipping between Hawaii and mainland is much more expensive then it needs to be.
The Jones act has to be one of the most destructive stupid laws that we have.
I have to disae javascript to read the article. The article was submitted to the internet archive and, surprisingly, I also had to disable javascript there https://web.archive.org/web/20260420211512/https://slate.com...
Looks like premature collapse of a monoculture due to excess stress, much of it a result of human effort.
I don't think monoculture is relevant for once; the bacteria affects all citrus trees: oranges, limes, lemons, grapefruits, pomelos, etc.
Yeah, not just one or two susceptible varieties.
But when you have nothing but the perfect host for the infection, in incredibly massive proportions as far as the eye can see, a little bacteria goes a long way.
Which can be even worse :(
But those are all the same plant - hybridized Citrus.
It's not monoculture, it's Florida's climate being the perfect environment for the psyllid that causes the disease. California's drier, less humid climate has been more resilient to the bug.
The other thing that I can't help but think has seriously hurt the industry is that, between concentrate and flavor packs, almost all supermarket orange juice tastes like garbage. Fresh-squeezed orange juice is, of course, the benchmark. If you ever taste Minute Maid back-to-back with fresh-squeezed, well, you probably won't be buying Minute Maid again any time soon. It just doesn't even taste like oranges. There are a few brands available (the expensive ones, of course) that do come close enough to actually taste like oranges, but when the mass-market product falls that far down in quality, you can't help but wonder how anyone still wants to buy it.
The process to make never concentrated orange juice logistically viable involves removing all the oxygen from the juice so it stores well. Now you can take a seasonal product like oranges and sell the juice the entire year around. Unfortunately removing the oxygen also removes most of the flavor. so what the bottlers do is add an engineered "flavor package" when they bottle the juice to add the flavor back.
I am halfway convinced that flavor wise frozen concentrated orange juice is "closer to the tree" than the "never concentrated" stuff. Nothing on fresh squeezed. But that is the price we pay to have a non-seasonal product.
Is it really non-seasonal any longer now that there are reliable international markets in southern hemisphere to support?
I mean, they don't get teleported to the point of sale so most of the rules still apply to long distance shipping.
A local grocery store used to make their own fresh squeezed using a refrigerator sized stainless steel machine that might as well have been a Rube Goldberg machine with its winding metal wire chute full of oranges which led to the squeezing head. That thing was kept right in the aisle next to the refrigerator case they kept the juice in. It was the best orange juice though expensive as it was over 10 bucks a quart when the store finally closed. I tried to call and buy the machine but got nowhere. Turns out the owner died so the family closed up the shop and liquidated it.
As for Minute Maid, it has always tasted awful to me and it tasted worse in the 80s. The only packaged OJ I can stand is Tropicana.
Or you can buy a citrus juicer and make it yourself. A couple or three oranges and a few seconds in the morning.
OXO Good Grips runs about $20, it's a squeeze-by-hand option. You can get a wooden reamer, or spend about or upwards of a Franklin for something complicated, though I find simpler is saner.
I have both an old school glass dish reamer as well as a wooden reamer. Use it for making lemon/lime iced tea (using actual tea, not that powered sugar crap) for the summer months.
pretty much everywhere in the Netherlands has contraptions like this, small though, not fridge sized. Didn't see orange concentrate anywhere.
Minute maid actually tastes better than Tropicana to me (can't stand that brand), been getting one from Spain lately at Costco (Don Simon) that's pretty good, less sweet.
Standard in France and Belgium as well.
I have never liked Tropicana or Minute Maid, but about... 30 years ago? We used to have a brand called Fruvita that actually tasted good but it got bought by Tropicana, the taste changed, and we just stopped buying orange juice.
A Sam's Club in my area has started selling fresh squeezed orange juice. It's quite delicious. (And yes, it's pricey.) I've looked around at many other stores (including places like Whole Foods) and nobody else seems to be doing this.
Tropicana used to get high marks from me. The only brand I buy in a grocery store is Natalie’s.
Fresh squeezed is amazing.
I've always found it pretty scary how some mass-market foods have diverged almost completely from the thing they are actually representing. The weird milky vaguely-citrus flavor of chemical that comes in the box labeled "Orange Juice" is just one of many examples. For another example, go taste a grape and then taste some so-called "grape juice." It's actually mostly apple juice, and doesn't even remotely taste like grapes.
Dark grape juice is made of concord grapes which are the primary variety which is made into jelly, jam, juice, and in general grape flavored things. They don't taste like grocery store eating grapes, they're a different variety.
THEY ARE DELICIOUS when you can find them, one of the things I miss about living in California was the brief season you could get a concord grape on the vine to eat. I have never seen them outside a bay area farmer's market, late summer if I remember correctly.
I love concord grapes so much. Im eagerly awaiting their annual return to the farmers market (early September). I love them so much the vendors know to get me and tell me when they are here. I don't understand why the demand for them is small.
I also deeply miss the limes. The halfway-to-yellow actually ripened limes that didn't even show up some years.
If I knew for sure when they would be available I'd certainly make a trip across the country to eat those limes.
Those lines are just hanging out on the trees around for most of the year! Best storage for citrus is on the tree.
Concord grapes are pretty common in season in New York State, and I’m assuming the states nearby.
I never understood why grape flavored things taste the way they do until I (accidentally) bought Concord grapes.
That said, "delicious" is definitely a matter of opinion.
I haven't had minute maid in a long time, but I enjoy Simply, and Sam's club house brand is pretty good as well.
Nothing like a fresh Florida orange, though. I used to know a secret tree in a public preserve that had the best oranges known to man.
I might drive down this winter and see if it's still there.
It may surprise you to learn that Simply Beverages is owned by Coca-Cola, who also own Minute Maid.
Simply is definitely the superior of their product lines.
Back before Starbucks bought them, Evolution was magical. They sold cold-pressed orange juice in the store that tasted fresh. I lived by that stuff!
From the store bought orange juices, I think the Trader joes one is the closest to tasting like fresh-squeezed.
It’s the boiling frog problem. Consumers gradually become used to lower quality. 15 years ago, McDonald’s was good. You knew it was bad for you but it was so good that you just didn’t care and it was a great cheat meal. You could get an Angus Delux meal for $7. https://wealthgang.com/mcdonalds-prices-throughout-the-years...
Of course they discontinued the angus burgers that actually used high quality ingredients compared to the McDouble / quarter pounders.
Now it’s $12 for a double quarter pounder meal and it tastes like shit. I only notice this because I just didn’t eat there much in the last 15 years. Meat quality and bun quality has clearly gotten worse. I don’t know how they keep growing sales.
The Big Arch patty is better than the angus was. Their baseline burgers have always been crap.
It was a sad day for me when I realized that a glass of orange juice(or any juice in general) isn't much better for your health than a can of soda and probably even worse than diet/zero coke.
This is what happened to me. I would guzzle orange juice. I couldn’t start a day unless I had a giant glass of it. Then I found out that it was just all sugar and not much else. I don’t think I’ve had a glass of the stuff in over a decade.
They advertise vitamin C, but that's in tons of other things. Even used as a preservative.
I love cutting grapefruit in half and digging out chunks because at the end you get to drink grapefruit juice the way it was intended, as a reward for eating grapefruit.
fun fact: be careful if you're on any medications.
Especially any immune suppressant medications.
Do you eat the seeds and poop them out somewhere nice? I think that’s what the grapefruit intended.
You could make the argument that the grapefruit succeeded in its intention already, by being so good that humanity tends and manages whole groves of grapefruit trees
No that's silly. Everyone knows that when you eat a seed like that, the plant grows in your belly.
this made my day
as a kid I was thoroughly disappointed learning this not being real. probably more so than finding out about Santa.
What if you make fresh squeezed OJ at home, eat the leftover pulp and skins first, and then drink the juice? I wonder if that has the same glycemic impact as eating an orange.
The juice is still much less healthy. It’s the act of having your guts extract the nutrients that makes fruit healthy, because it reduces how quickly your body absorbs it. Once you make it into juice (or a smoothie) by mechanically digesting it prior to consumption, you’ve removed the need for that.
Why not just eat the orange. I can't be the only one who finds eating the pulp alone icky. Like chewing on a damp rag.
How do you put vodka into an orange?
Open the orange, remove the giraffe, put in the vodka.
(Variation on: <https://www.smart-words.org/jokes/giraffe-refrigerator-eleph...>.)
Alternatively, use an apple-corer to breach the peel, pour in a shot of vodka, and drink with a straw, much as with watermelon:
<https://www.thespruceeats.com/vodka-watermelon-recipe-417556...>.
The Irishman taught me how to put vodka into a watermelon.
Most artificial sweeteners have metabolic side effects, and lead to weight gain.
You’re probably better off drinking cane sugar soda because it is more filling than HFCS soda.
Anyway orange juice is probably better still. At least it has some vitamin C and maybe trace fiber in it.
> Most artificial sweeteners have metabolic side effects, and lead to weight gain.
So does sugar. Everything ever credibly published on the effects of artificial sweeteners say four things:
1) everything else held equal, artificial sweeteners unequivocally reduce weight gain vs consuming equivalent sugar because sugar is 100% empty calories
2) some artificial sweeteners (e.g. sucralose) may increase appetite vs equivalent sugar, causing you to possibly eat more depending on which ones you consume
3) various artificial sweeteners may have non-weight-related negative effects on the body related to cardiovascular health, gut health, and so on
4) sugar definitely has a whole bunch of non-weight-related negative effects on the body related to cardiovascular health, gut health, and so on
Sugar is not just empty calories. Your muscles need glycogen, which is produced from carbohydrates—including sugar—to function.
Simple sugars are particularly effective at restoring glycogen stores after intense cardiovascular workouts.
It seems you may not know what the phrase "empty calories" means, so, let me help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_calories
Lumping simple sugar in with complex carbohydrates as equally beneficial because they're both carbohydrate molecules is horrendous prevarication. And bringing up "intense workouts" at all, which I'm sure you very well know is demographically an extreme outlier scenario, in a conversation about weight gain, is the most hilarious kind of derailment.
no metabolic effects from sweeteners, wish you lot would stop moving the goalposts on why sweeteners are unhealthy:
This just in, licorice kills dogs. Once in a while it kills people too. (affects insulin production, and aldosterone causing blood pressure effects then downstream effects on blood potassium and kidneys)
The abstract says the study is useless:
> However, given this study applied a heterogeneous ASB formula, it could not adequately consider the role of specific artificial sweeteners. Further research is needed to evaluate the potential effect of different artificial sweeteners and their doses on health.
it's also not the only study, just one example, besides that's standard boilerplate CE so as not to assume liability.
Similar to the reports that talk about health problems with sweeteners. Not enough good data to be informative and actionable.
There seems to be little to no evidence of any negative effects from just about any artificial sweeteners. I mean shoot, Aspartame immediately breaks down into some of the most common amino acids in the body. There's no biological mechanism for it to do anything negative.
Sugar, on the other hand, has very well known and studied health risks at the concentrations we see in a lot of modern 'staples' - soda and juice included.
>Most artificial sweeteners have metabolic side effects, and lead to weight gain.
I have not seen a single double blind study show this in the many decades low calorie sweeteners have been consumed (in normal amounts).
What I have seen is study after study showing the harms of consuming too many carbohydrates (the amounts contained in normal consumption of juice due to quantity of sugar).
Yes, the way I've heard it put is eating an orange is fine, but drinking a glass of juice is like eating an entire orchard.
It's not who killed it, it's what killed it and the answer is greed.
For anyone not aware, the most proximate cause of the disappearance of "Florida Orange Juice™ " is the Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus bacteria. Monoculture is often blamed, but the bacteria affects all citrus trees - oranges, limes, lemons, grapefruits, pomelos, etc.
According to the article, the reason why the bacteria was so quickly fatal for Florida orange trees is that their roots were weakened by a sequence of major hurricanes and by many years of excessive pesticide use.
Those are all the same plant. Hybrids of Citrus. A monoculture.
In the past, "monoculture" was used to describe things like "one particular variety of banana"[0] - e.g. the Gros Michel banana fell to fungus and was replaced by the Cavendish banana, which was not susceptible to the same fungus but is now also falling to a similar fungus, and will be replaced by another banana variety. In fact, they're not just the same species but closely related cultivars - both part of the AAA banana cultivar group (triploid cultivars of Musa acuminata).
The article in Time Magazine puts it succinctly:
> There’s a name for this situation: monoculture, the practice of fostering just one variety of something.
In the case of bananas (and many other crops, plants, decorative trees, etc), a diversity of varieties would have minimized the spread and impact of pathogens, while providing a more diverse selection of nutritional content and flavor for consumers. But that doesn't seem to be the case for citrus trees.
I don't think that "monoculture", as it has been used or the past 50+ years, is the appropriate concept to apply to this citrus greening. Perhaps we could criticize something else - like tree density? Or perhaps monoculture is the problem, but in a much broader sense - maybe a grove with 10% citrus trees, 10% corn, 10% soybeans, 10% berries, 10% apple trees, etc...would create a biome that was hostile to the citrus greening bacteria in such a way that it couldn't thrive and spread. We have no data to support that hypothesis at this time though.
0: "What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana" https://time.com/5730790/banana-panama-disease/
Monoculture can also mean just one species.
Citrus isn't one species but hybrids of citrons, mandarins, pomelos in Citrus genus. It isn't like cabbage that produces multiple cultivars. Citrus genus is supposed to be diverse cause they do hybridization in wild.
