What killed the Florida orange?(slate.com) |
What killed the Florida orange?(slate.com) |
(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.)
> 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.
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.
And yes, you used to be able to go outside at night in March and April smell the beautiful scent of the orange blossoms. It is certainly something of "Old Florida" that I miss.
These things used form a massive canopy or grove naturally in so many places, towering over the homes and undeveloped properties.
Which is why so many old homes had the 3 inch thick white tiles on the roof. When one of the nuts comes down from up there it hits pretty hard, even if it's not a hurricane.
Almost all virtually gone, and what's there now is really all the result of landscaping efforts ever since, using resistant varieties that are quite dwarf by comparison.
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.
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)
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.
Juice oranges have a tougher, thinner rind that doesn't peel easily, and they have seeds. But they have better taste and more juice than navel oranges.
I'd beg to differ - navel oranges produce the smoother flavor and are what get used in making Tropicana. Always has been that way.
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.
Floridians deserve the results.
I will grant clemency for anyone who was born there and isn’t wealthy enough to move out.
I will grant 10x hate for anyone who moved there for the politics and complains about the results.
If Billy Bowlegs or Geronimo come back, I'll vote for them. I'd consider voting for someone who actually respected this place, but I'm not sure anyone does. I've been to nearly every state, and some other lands, but there's no place finer. I'm pure Florida man.
* 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.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cul...
I've always wanted to try it in my own cold environment.
Granny Smith and Pink Lady were also considered treats when it came to apples, compared to the usual golden delicious or braeburn.
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.
I was just talking about the devastation that invasive species and diseases have caused not just in America, even though it’s most acute there in many ways, but also all over the whole planet. I don’t think people really have any understanding for just how decimated the planet is due to invasive species, arguably including the rapacious types of humans were have.
Orange are just a tiny little example of that; forest the farms devastated the natural ecosystems, then monoculture and pesticides destroyed native species, and now a disease from the old country is devastating the invasive oranges. Left behind will be what, more luxury condos?
They still grow millions of pineapples
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_greening_disease#Contro...]
More interesting was a suggestion that a more holistic approach may have merit, i.e. improving overall soil/grove health with less intensive methods. [https://citrusindustry.net/2019/04/02/citrus-grower-sees-suc...]
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 :(
What did he think of all this, I asked him. What happened to the Florida orange?
“I think they killed it themselves, with chemicals. That’s a fact,” Gunther said. In my time in Florida, I’d found a more complicated story, but down here, everyone had their theories, their longing for citrus nirvana, and their anger at the loss.
“They sprayed so much chemicals, the damn grass don’t even grow here anymore—you can quote me,” Gunther said. “I knew it back in 1990. I said, ‘They’re sprayin’ so much chemicals it’s gonna be the end.’ And it’s the end.”
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.
The fun part was trying to find good estimates for viscosity for the two phase orange sludge in order to properly size the piping and pumps. Treating food products like chemical production is its own weird sub-specialty.
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.
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.
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.
You push the white lever and juice comes out. In grocery shops it's customer operated.
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.
Fresh squeezed is amazing.
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.
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.
Simply is definitely the superior of their product lines.
Critic acid is probably the most potent tooth eroding dietary acid you can put in your mouth. This means anything lemon based is out, even sparkling water with lemon flavor. Orange juice is also out simply because of the sheer quantity.
Sugar based soda is terrible because it leads to oral dysbiosis, which is the leading cause of caries (bacterial acids) and gum disease. If you have persistent bad breath or bitterness in your mouth, you will probably need a probiotic treatment.
But here is the kicker: Diet soda is even more acidic than regular soda! Worse, avoid anything with orange or lemon added to it.
Although drinking water is the best thing you can do for your teeth, this doesn't mean you have to give up on juice or soda. It just means you should never drink juice or soda on its own. Always drink it in combination with a meal to soak up the acids. No matter what you eat, you should always wash it down with plain water.
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.
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
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).
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.
With the characteristic doppler effect of a rapidly passing train horn simulated by the fiddle player.
That Orange Blossom Special, doesn't run through Waldo any more.
A solution here could be growing a larger variety of produce, using organic farming practices, crop rotation, etc. Pests tend to specialize in specific things and most pests have natural predators. So, if you stop killing those they'll help keep outbreaks in check. And if you rotate crops, you take away the food source for the pests. And if you grown a variety of different things, it won't all get sick at the same time.
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.
The flavor coming right off the tree can be truly candy-like given optimal conditions. After tasting the best ones from my own tree, I had the revelation that so many things that are "orange flavored" are mimicking navels specifically.
I'm a native too and I'll add a data point.
It's people who moved to Florida that voted the destructive operators into leadership positions, once they outnumbered the natives.
What I can say is that the terrain is being pushed too far and closer to a breaking point than most realize. One anomalous back-to-back hurricane series could reveal this rather harshly. Florida is wetlands, not a shopping center. We can't just expect the bays to swallow everything. Someday we could have airboat options for visiting Disney. Pestilence, contamination from flooding, excessive heat on an isolated power island, mucho etc - yeah, we could realize soon.
Ok, then you have the capability of leaving and haven’t. I judge you heavily.
Everytime I hear a southron bastard crow about secession I agree with them. Especially when I see the morons making up maps of the “national divorce” that give New England the gas fields of Pennsylvania.
I hope bugs bunny manifests into reality and cuts Florida off of the mainland.
I still love tiny red bananas though, they are so sweet!
The bananas I had as a child back in 1960 had the strong flavor of isoamyl acetate along with the natural bouquet of related flavors in lesser amounts.
I hated it.
The space-age banana popsicles were even worse because they were nothing but isoamyl acetate.
Simple sugars are particularly effective at restoring glycogen stores after intense cardiovascular workouts.
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.
> 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.
(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 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/
The industrialization of food is really what enables our modern way of life. But it slightly horrifies me every time I learn more about it.
If I knew for sure when they would be available I'd certainly make a trip across the country to eat those limes.
That said, "delicious" is definitely a matter of opinion.
It's less silly than taking a shot of vodka and eating an orange. Tastier too.
Maybe there's not really accurate terminology for this.
Either way we do have to allow more often for the occasional passerby who is fully convinced that adding all that tonnage of glyphosate for so many recent years was a supernatural event, and not the result of any human initiative :\
On top of all that natural disaster, it wouldn't take as much of a straw to break the camel's back. Or the other way around; on top of all the industrial excess, the same natural disaster can have a more devastating effect.
Or maybe it's not thought to be premature at all, but long overdue.
If somebody was thinking that though, you figure they would leave a comment to that effect.
https://www.grassrootinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/0...
Also the OP suggested that Hawaiian production is on decline so shipping from Hawaii to mainland is the issue.
Jones Act doesn't accomplish what it's supposed to do but that's mainly because it was weak protectionism. Many other countries just shovel government money into their shipbuilding at rates that would probably make many just as angry.
It doesn't help that the US is full of non-contiguous territory separated by deep ocean. Other countries have similar laws but aren't as impacted.
However, the Jones act doesn't really have much of an impact compared to the significantly higher cost of labor in the US compared to brazil and india. Also the US got rid of alot of sugar subsidies, and import controls which essentially made sugar growing aside for some specialized situations infeasible.
> the high-caliber hurricanes that, before climate change, didn’t come to the Ridge
These recent storms only got to Cat4.
Similar storms hit the aforementioned areas in 2004-05 including Cat4.
How do these revelations not contradict the article?
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...
This is the conventional wisdom, and it is completely falsified by the actual data that I linked to. I wrote a python script to go process and plot it, and there has been zero increase in Cat 1, 2, 3, or 4 storms hitting the US since 1851 (there are only 4 Cat 5s listed total).
Try it for yourself.
It’s like saying the UV radiation hitting the earth is the same as it was historically so therefore an ozone hole in Australia didn’t exist and cataracts can’t be higher there.
It seems many are jumping to biases about climate change without reviewing the data as you did.
And the article should've been written with more nuance.
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.
I love the stories about people in FL self-insuring now because it's cheaper to repair drywall than pay premiums.
Now, I see a slate of historical hurricanes in FL from 2004-05 that hit the Ridge area. This contradicts the article as these weren't baby storms.
The issue is clearly the rise of this blight bacteria that has made the groves less resilient to storms and has weakend production.
Just not true with their phrasing.
edit:
for clarity, the author referenced 2017+ vintage hurricanes as if nothing of their intensity had hit before: Irma (2017), Ian (2022), Idalia (2023), Helene (2024), and Milton (2024). None of these got beyond cat 4. Meanwhile there were certainly other hurricanes that were cat4 that hit the groves in 2004-05.
You have to diagnose a problem correctly in order to have a chance at solving it.
It’s great you’re bringing data to the table but you’re overstating its validity to the assertion dramatically.
Finally I’d note you’re asserting an analysis you’ve done without providing the data, method, or any reproducibility. So while you might personally feel you’ve done an accurate job, your assertions are citing exclusively yourself, against hidden methods, making it of no more quality than a puff piece article citing research without citation that you’re arguing against.
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.htm...
The analysis is easy: copy and paste the data from that link into a new text file, then write a python script that goes through it and counts the number of Cat 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5 hurricanes that make landfall per year (the "Highest Saffir-Simpson U.S. Category" column), and then make the plots: I used gnuplot. You can then do fits to the data if you'd like, but the flat trend lines over the last 175 years are obvious.
I encourage you to not trust me and to do it yourself, but I'm also happy to share my script, let me know.
As far as the hurricane trajectory trend lines go, they are clearly highly stochastic: check out e.g. both the spaghetti plot predictions for various storms from previous years, and ask google for a map of where they grow (grew...) oranges in Florida.
Do actual climate scientists claim we're getting more, and stronger, hurricanes now than we did before?
At some point the discourse changed from “just because it’s a cold winter doesn’t mean that global warming isn’t happening” to “every hurricane/wildfire is due to climate change” and it’s ridiculous.
I honestly think a lot of young people don’t realize that while climate change is probably real our weather and variability hasn’t changed that much - yet, at least.
The general line is that climate change has probably increased the amount of rainfall associated with hurricanes, possibly the severity of hurricanes (due to sea level rise and warmer water) but there isn't good evidence that it has increased the frequency of hurricanes.
Climate science is also highly political, and seems to have a big economic impact…
"Much" is one of those vague words, where it's true and false depending on your meaning.
If you live on any of the transition zones between climates, as I did growing up, it is directly visible: My experience of snow in the south coast of the UK was almost entirely in the early years of my childhood, and family photos of my older siblings show that they had even more than me. My parents had experiences of even deeper and longer cold, with ponds freezing completely solid, not just a layer of ice on the top.
I can easily imagine someone who lives in the parts of the US where all the winter urban snow photos come from, may not notice the loss of a 1-2 centimetres out of 100cm of snowfall, but when it's your last centimetre, it's much easier to spot.
For hurricanes this seems especially problematic because the historical categorization system is based on radar-observed width of the storm. "More energy" means that the categories stay the same over time, but every category is getting worse (more rainfall, heavier/faster winds, further travel, higher damage).
As with so many statistical phenomenon, it's also a reminder to be careful what metrics you are trying to compare. Comparing just the hurricane categories to historic values may just be the exact sort of wrong metric, for these "more energy" concerns.
Now I'm confused again, because OP used data going back to 1851. We didn't have radar in the 19th century.
The original point still stands that Hurricanes are defined by only the one metric and other metrics have room to grow bigger as the category stays the same:
> The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale is a 1 to 5 rating based only on a hurricane's maximum sustained wind speed. This scale does not take into account other potentially deadly hazards such as storm surge, rainfall flooding, and tornadoes.
