"An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a 10-ton truck and not even wet the pavement."This was one of my favorite quotes from a reading section on McPhee, whose way of interviewing and writing is quite astonishing when you do some reading as to his method. To each his own, but I will simply say that I far prefer Florida oranges. And you can quote me on that.
~ John McPhee (Oranges, 1967)
Back when I was attending UConn (as a commuter student) in the spring semester of 2003, I would often put an orange in the mesh pouch on my backpack. That would be the space that's designed to hold water/soda bottles --- a more recent backpack evolutionary adaptation since everyone seemed to stop drinking free tap water so they could buy a $1 bottled water with a label. During that semester I would drive in at 10 a.m. and stayed on campus all day because I had a "Law of Libel" class that was (probably still is... the instructor the department uses has a day job) only ever scheduled from 6 - 7:30 p.m. Didn't make much sense to drive all the way home in the afternoon only to have to drive back. It was like this for much of my time at the U, but it was for the best, as it pretty much forced me into the library where I would do my reading and other work for most of the day.
Anyway, I would arrive ~30 minutes early in the room in the crummy Arjona building, arrange the desks (which had been scattered hither and yon during the day) in rows, erase the chalkboard, then sit down to peel and eat my orange. It was usually my only sustenance during the day before I got home --- good thing I am a light eater. They were rather large oranges and they had to have been from Florida because they were very juicy.
Before this time I would usually 'eat' an orange by mashing and sucking the juice out of each section, then spitting out the pulp. Wasn't a fan of pulp. Grew up hating what we called "floatees" in orange juice. The semester before, though, I took a Botany course for a science credit and lab dissections really changed how I saw plants and, on the topic, fruit. When you break an orange open, inside the sections are thousands of sacs called hesperidium that contain the juice of the orange. Oranges --- as I found with all fruit --- really have a remarkable structure, when you take the time to look at how they form. But, most people who take interest in an orange do so for the taste, not to look at the hesperidium. Who can blame them?
No comments:
Post a Comment