The seven sections of Oranges don’t feel like they necessarily have to be in the order they’re in, which is maybe the only thing I didn’t like about this book: it sometimes felt a little disjointed. Still, this was a really interesting read and I kept telling my boyfriend various things I was learning about oranges in general, and about the Florida orange industry (up to 1965) in particular. I learned that Florida oranges are (or were?) juicier than California oranges. I learned that ripe oranges aren’t necessarily orange: as McPhee puts it:
An orange can be as sweet and ripe as it will ever be and still glisten like an emerald in the tree. Cold—coolness, rather—is what makes an orange orange. In some parts of the world, the weather never gets cold enough to change the color; in Thailand, for example, an orange is a green fruit, and traveling Thais often blink with wonder at the sight of oranges the color of flame. (10)
(Related to the above, I learned that as of the time of McPhee’s writing, early-season Florida oranges were turned from green to orange, either by exposing them to ethylene gas, or by applying a dye to them. I’m unclear whether the latter is still done—McPhee says the dyed oranges were a hit in the Midwest.) I learned that orange trees can be very old: there was one in Europe that lived for 473 years. I learned that Harriet Beecher Stowe ran an orange grove in Florida for 17 years, and that as of 1965, “Oranges that happen to be going to New York cross the Hudson River on barges and enter the city at Pier 28 at the western end of Canal Street,” where “all fresh fruit of any kind that is shipped to New York City for auction is sold” (116). This book has some great vivid images: talking about those fruit auctions, McPhee writes about a wooden-walled room thick with cigar smoke; elsewhere he writes about a low-riding white Cadillac in Florida that was full of stolen oranges—3500 of them.
McPhee writes about his travels in orange-growing parts of Florida in 1965, and it’s interesting to see the state of the orange industry at that time: the big growth area was frozen concentrate. McPhee looks down on groves from helicopters, watches buds being put onto root stock, visits the University of Florida Citrus Experiment Station, and learns, among other things, about the various ways orange-growers have of fighting frost/hard freezes. He also writes about the introduction of the orange to Europe, and orangeries in France, and the Indian River orange boom in the 1800s, and in addition to all the orange-related stuff there are some great character-based snippets here, including one awful/hilarious story about someone who was convinced he had gangrene, though he didn’t. This is a short book, but a very full one, and I’m pleased to have read it.
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