The writer's fruit
William Boyd
ORANGES by John McPhee Penguin Classics, £6.99, pp. 149 Eery morning of the year — well, almost every morning of the year — I select four oranges, which have been chill- ing overnight in the fridge, I bisect them and squeeze them for their juice with my big, robustly efficient, Italian, hand- levered, juice extractor. This juice — it's pithy, thick — I then drink within a few seconds of its being squeezed, rapidly, and with intense and acute pleasure. Let's say this happens 300 times a year: that means that, in any given year, I get through at least 1,200 oranges. I can't think of another fruit I consume more of — I can't think of another fruit that occupies such a promi- nent place in my diet — and yet I know vir- tually nothing about oranges. Rather, I knew nothing about oranges until I read John McPhee's beguiling, fascinating, clas- sic monograph on the subject. Now I bisect and squeeze my oranges with new appreci- ation for this marvellous fruit.
Oranges began life as a New Yorker article in the 1960s, one of those famously idiosyncratic commissions that the leg- endary editor William Shawn used to bestow on his young writers. McPhee sug- gested the one-word title, Shawn said, 'Yes. Oh, yes.' And this delectable book was born.
For orange innocents, as most of us are, McPhee's book is a compendium of amaz- ing facts. For example, oranges turn orange when they are cold. When they're warm they stay green, or green with pale yellow splodges. (Actually I realised that I half- knew this because the first oranges I ate were in Africa and all the oranges there were green: I had assumed African oranges were a different variety). Another example: sometimes, if you plant an orange pip a grapefruit or a lemon will grow from it. In the USA, in a given year, around 225 billion oranges are grown. An orange picked from the bottom of the tree is not as sweet as the fruit picked from the top. The most common orange, one that accounts for half the fruit grown around the world, is the 'Late Orange of Valencia' — and so on.
McPhee takes us through orange lore, scientific, horticultural and taxonomic, with unpretentious, anecdotal ease — one sens- es his own fascination with the facts he uncovers. He flies down to Florida, where more oranges are grown than anywhere else in the world, to meet the orange barons, the manufacturers and the orange- grove owners. Ironically, despairingly, he finds it almost impossible to find any fresh orange juice to drink: everyone's taste has become corrupted, the locals prefer the packaged variety, or frozen concentrate with water added.
He takes us through the history of orange growing and the steady dispersal of the fruit around the world and also picks out mentions and sightings of oranges where they feature in literature and art. However, as a 1,000-orange-a-year man I found the passages on the healthful aspects of the fruit particularly consoling. Great claims have been made for the orange: eat- ing oranges helps cure or prevent all man- ner of ailments from peptic ulcers to heart attacks, from liver trouble to fatigue (this has to be the writer's fruit, it occurred to me). It was a little deflating to be told a few pages later that it wasn't so much the orange that was responsible for these pro- phylactic marvels as boring old vitamin C. Still, as a vitamin C delivery machine, an orange has to be more agreeable than a capsule or a pill.
Of course orange farmers and retailers have not been content with what many would regard as a near perfect fruit. Gassing oranges — exposing them to ethy- lene gas — makes them even more orange. Other manufacturers dye their oranges with something called dimethoxy-phenlazo, or Citrus Red no.2. After they have been dyed oranges are brushed with nylon bris- tles and then coated in an edible wax. If that sounds somewhat artificial it is nothing compared to what happens in the industrial process of making concentrate or 'chilled' juice, the juice that goes into bottles and cartons. The problem is, as any fresh 'Really? My grandfather picked cotton too, though he preferred worsted for formal occasions.' orange-juice drinker will confirm, that the bottled or cartoned variety doesn't taste like real orange juice. This is the manufac- turer's biggest moan. 'We have always had the flavour of fresh oranges to come up against,' one factory owner complained to McPhee, in petulant outrage. As McPhee explains it, the chemistry of real orange juice is so subtle and complicated that most attempts to identify as to what actually makes the taste itself are tentative. The chief flavouring component is thought to be d-limonene, the main ingredient of peel oil (common to all citrus fruits). This is the substance you twist from lemon peel onto the surface of your dry martini and this is what burns your lips as you bite into oranges. But nobody seems to know just how much d-limonene should be added to achieve ideal orangeness. They can make the flavour of the chilled juice in their car- tons infinitely reproducible and homoge- nous but they are still frustrated when it comes to making it taste like real orange juice. A Tropicana executive proudly bragged to McPhee that Tropicana juice was 'the closest thing to freshly squeezed orange juice you can get and not do the work yourself.' The work? I shall stick to the real thing, thanks.
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