Oranges: More Than What You Need To Know

I was going to write an article praising Minneola oranges (my fave) and bashing Navel oranges (let's be honest: hit or miss, right?). After eating and photographing the fruit that was going to prove my point, I realized they were both delicious and bizarre.

Come inside!

Here are the photographs I took on my citrus journey, and some eye-opening facts about oranges.

  Eat a Navel Orange and take your mouth on a time machine ride

... with a clone who has a conjoined twin inside it. 

Kill...me...

Navel oranges have a mutation that causes them to develop a conjoined twin fruit at it's base. This mutation also leaves it seedless and sterile, making cutting and grafting the only means of cultivation. 

In 1873 three navel orange trees were brought from Brazil and planted in Riverside, California. The trees started producing fruit in 1878. Today, one of the three original trees is still alive and producing fruit.

Since grafting branches onto other living trees does not allow for selective breeding, all navel oranges can be considered fruits from that single nearly 150 year-old tree. They have exactly the same genetic make-up as the original tree and are, therefore, clones.

Names, names, the magical fruit...

Not the most impressive nip I've ever seen

The knob on a Minneola is called a nipple.

The Minneola tangelo is a cross between a Duncan grapefruit and a Dancy tangerine. Fancy pants.

Minneola, Florida sounds really boring and depressing. They appear to have a high unemployment rate, are considering building a horse racing track to create jobs, and are not currently growing their namesake fruit. 

The name Tangelo comes from the Honeybell variety of tangelo, which is a hybrid-cross between a Thompson tangerine and a pomelo. Also, pomelos, where have you been all my life?

What came first, the fruit or the color? Believe it or not, oranges are not named for their color. The word "orange" comes from a transliteration of the sanskrit "naranga" which comes from the Tamil "naru" which means "fragrant."
 
Before the late 15th century, the color orange existed in Europe, but without the name; it was simply called yellow-red. Spanish and Portuguese merchants brought the first orange trees to Europe from Asia in the late 15th and early 16th century.

In parts of Germany, the Netherlands, and Russia, the orange was called and is still called the "Chinese apple."

It's like apples and Chinese apples? 

Oranges and your body

 Use a straw while drinking orange juice, because the acids in the juice can cause the enamel of the tooth to erode. Therefore, the less contact juice makes with the teeth, the better.

You will have to eat 7 cups of cornflakes to get the same amount to fiber you would get from one medium orange. 

You can get gout from drinking OJ:

Fructose-rich beverages such as sugar-sweetened soda and orange juice can increase serum uric acid levels and, thus, the risk of gout. In a study, compared with consumption of less than 1 serving per month of sugar-sweetened soda, the multivariate relative risk of gout for 1 serving per day was 1.74 and for 2 or more servings per day was 2.39. The corresponding relative risks for orange juice were 1.41 and 2.42. Thus, the side effect of drinking orange juice is gout.

source - www.zhion.com 

 

In conclusion: 

 135 year-old clones, conjoined twins, nipples, depressing Florida towns, pomelos, everything you know about colors is wrong, Chinese apple just doesn't have the same ring to it, sad teeth, happy colon, gout.