Orange ya glad I didn't say banana again?

“A man is not an orange. You can't eat the fruit and throw the peel away!” Willie Loman
The orange is actually a berry, for they have many seeds, called pips, fleshy pulp and derive from a single ovary. The citrus genus of berries is classed as hesperidia, which denotes a berry with a rough skin of oil filled glands encasing segments, or carpels, with juice-filled vesicles, which are really specialized hair cells. Most sources say the orange came from around China, paleontologists have found seeds as old as 20 million years; cultivated oranges appeared as early as 2500 B.C. The bitter orange was known in ancient Rome through her eastern conquests, but didn’t begin to spread throughout Europe until the Moorish conquests of the 11th century. Orange cultivation exploded near the end of the 15th century as sweet varieties made their way from India. Almost all citrus easily interbreeds to form many varieties, ranging from bitter to sour to sweet. Brazil has become the largest producer of oranges and orange juice, doubling the output of #2 U.S.A. The navel is the result of mutation at a Brazilian monastery, which are easy to peel and have few seeds. Valencias and Hamlins are popular sweet juicing oranges; blood oranges have a deep burgundy to slightly red tinged flesh.

If junk food is the devil, then a sweet orange is as scripture. Audrey Foris

Is that a grapefruit in your pocket, or ...

“So far I've always kept my diet secret but now I might as well tell everyone what it is. Lots of grapefruit throughout the day and plenty of virile young men at night." Angie Dickinson

Your grapefruit or mine? Legend has it that the grapefruit is the result of a happy accident: in the late 17th Century, a Captain Shaddock brought some pummelos to the West Indies which crossed with citrus, probably oranges, that had been growing in the region and hybridized into the grapefruit – Columbus was known to have carried limes in his stores to the New World to ward off scurvy, and other citrus followed. In the 1750s the “forbidden fruit” of Barbados was described to the western world called the small shaddock by many and botanically as the Citrus Paradisi; the popular name grapefruit appeared from the fact that the fruits grow in clusters like grapes. Pink and Red grapefruit varieties began to appear in Florida groves in the early 20th century and are now among the most popular varieties. The grapefruit has become more popular then the pummelo from whence it came for several reasons: the rind is much thinner, yielding more meat for its size, it’s smaller making it more single serving size and more sweet hybrids have been developed. Incidentally, the bitterness of the grapefruit is largely contained in the membranes around the sections and is often removed to reveal the sweeter juice sacs inside. And when frozen, these sacs rupture to impart pulpiness and bitterness to juice.

There is a lot more juice in a grapefruit than meets the eye… Anonymous

He eats anything. Live animals, dead animals, rocks, lightbulbs, corkscrews, battery cables, cranberries...

“Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh... Now you tell me what you know.”
Captain Jeffrey T. Spaulding

Cranberries have been around for a long time - foraged for by Arctic nomads for millennia - but there are many American growing associations who insist they originated in North America. Native Americans partook of their tartness and were good enough to share them with the starving English settlers in Massachusetts in 1620, which is likely how they came to be part of the Thanksgiving repast. Since they had not seen the fruit before, the pilgrims assumed that they were obviously from a native plant. There is a popular myth that there are three fruits native to North America – the cranberry, which is found wild in ancient Russia and Scotland, along with the Concord grape (a hybrid) and the blueberry (known to Pliny and Virgil by other names) – though the blueberry is related to the Huckleberry of which a 13,000-year-old plant lives in Pennsylvania. There are real health benefits to the cranberry: high in vitamin C, low in calories, high in fiber and potassium.
The name we use morphed from “craneberry”: the flower resembles a crane and more likely because cranes love ‘em. Native New England tribes used them to flavor their pemmican – a wonderful concoction of meat, fat, and fruit, preserved by drying, to savor through the long winter months. This was such an important food product that the North West Company and the Hudson Bay Company fought the Pemmican War, which began in 1814, ending when the HBC absorbed the NWC in 1821. Kind of jerky, huh?

Cranberry sauce is yay-high, shaped like a can.
Kevin Burke