Transcript
Erin Menke (0:00)
This is an I Heart Podcast. Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.
Aaron Manke (0:17)
Our world is full of the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Louis Chevrolet (0:40)
A fruit is a delicate thing. Once it becomes ripe, a ticking clock begins. How long will it last before an animal devours it? Will it start to rot, or will it drop off and vanish into the dirt? This is a calculation built into the genes of millions of plants. The sweet exteriors of fruits protect their seeds and incentivize animals to eat and spread the plant far and wide. We sometimes forget that the foods we consider ubiquitous have a very specific natural role, and it required a lot of careful engineering to get them to where they are today. Some even had to be invented from whole clothes. Take the sweet orange. Its first mention in writing comes from Chinese literature of the third century B.C. it's a hybrid fruit that seems to have originated in East Asia before spreading to the Middle East, Europe, and the rest of the globe. Along the way, it spawned varieties like the blood orange and the navel orange, and its popularity speaks for itself. However, as with all fruits, preservation was a significant problem throughout recorded history. Limes, a sister fruit of the citrus family, became well known as a treat for sailors at sea. But oranges proved to be somewhat more difficult to transport between continents. Even after Christopher Columbus brought lime seeds to the Caribbean and introduced citrus fruits, production in North America lagged behind. California hadn't yet been turned into a powerhouse of orange production, so the fruit was seen as an exotic delicacy of sorts of and those who wanted to serve oranges to their dinner guests had to endure some truly unhinged efforts to transport the fruit. In January of 1859, tabloids latched on eagerly to a story out of Puerto Rico. A ship set sail from the islands under full sail, bound for New England. The goal was to deliver a load of 300,000 oranges to the east coast in still edible condition. A race against time and nature. It was an optimistic attempt. However, by the time the ship arrived in Boston harbor, its cargo was in less than ideal condition. More than 200,000 oranges. Two thirds of the cargo had rotted during the voyage. It might have smelled nice, but that fruit was no longer edible. Fortunately for the residents of Massachusetts, almost a hundred thousand oranges is still quite the supply. On January 25th of 1859, a lavish dinner was held in Boston to celebrate the birthday of poet Robert Burns. On the menu for the shindig, we can still read about the lavish dishes they ate, but among the dessert menu is a deceptively simple line item. Oranges. It seems that this was the final destination of those nearly rotten fruits from Puerto Rico, and perhaps some of the most inedible ones were still used to help flavor the orange sherbet listed beside it on the menu. It wouldn't be until much later that someone would propose that ice could be used to preserve food products for transport across the world, and enterprising individuals would bring orange seeds to different parts of North America, attempting to introduce the plant to the new World. And today we're not lacking for options wherever we look. Humans have been eating oranges for at least 2,300 years, but it wasn't until the past few hundred that we finally made it a global possibility. It's almost a little microcosm of what technological advance really means for a species. Not conquest or efficiency, but triumph over entropy. The natural cycle of a plant, a fruit, an animal. These were once fixed things that started the moment it entered the world. And now we no longer have to race ships in order to bulk order citrus fruits. An orange has gone from being a treasure obtained at great risk to to being simply a product. But maybe if we change our mindset just a little, it can be a treasure again.