Did you know that a citrus fruit is, botanically, a berry?I didn't either. I have yet to source the explanation behind this one, but I can at least say that this is not an idea fabricated in my mind. No. I read this in a book, called 'Oranges' by John McPhee.
I admit, I am a closeted fan of the colour Orange. This came to the fore a few years ago, when, despite my outward loathing of the hue, I found, in my closet, a band of reddish-yellow shirts, skirts and socks. Indeed, I nearly purchased an Orange road bike, before I set my eyes on one that was Olive. Yes Olive. I must be drawn to colours that are also edible.
The book was written in the sixties. McPhee, a reporter for the New York Times, was commissioed to write an article on the US orange industry and found such a wealth of information that he translated it into a book - about Oranges.
It has certainly opened my appetite for the fruit. I bought myself a carton of organic orange juice - unfortunately from concentrate, a process I now know more than I ever would have liked to know about. Still I pierced the lid with my plastic straw and slurped and read and savoured.
The book is remarkable, in that McPhee has taken a subject which one might expect to be bland or boring, and engages the social and historical relevance of the fruit.
It talks of Orange Men - men who worked the groves in the US, picking bushels of oranges throughout the harvest, a whole culture of workers with their own take on the industry and the fruit. This I found amusing:
'An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick sinks that break easily and come off in hunks...In Florida it is said that you can run over a California orange with a ten-ton truck and not even wet the pavement.' (pp. 9)
