Premise
In Oranges, John McPhee travels around 1960s Florida interviewing the people involved in its booming citrus industry. At times, he discusses the history of Florida’s largest citrus-growing regions (the Ridge and Indian River) as well as the history of citrus fruits themselves.
Seriously, Though
This book legitimately is all about oranges, and I actually did learn interesting things about oranges and the American citrus industry.
For example, there is (or at least, was?) a feud between Florida and California citrus farmers. Florida farmers claim California oranges are too dry, and, somewhat predictably, California farmers claim Florida oranges are too juicy. From the book:
Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first… In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a ten-ton truck and not even wet the pavement.
I also learned that citrus farming is (or at least seems) quite difficult. I’d concede this is partially due to a lack of domain knowledge on my part, but passages like this make me think citrus farmers have a lot to worry about.
In varying amounts, he feeds the trees nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium, iron, copper, manganese, zinc, boron, and molybdenum. The trees, in turn, are fed upon, or otherwise attacked, by many kinds of mites, insects, and fungus diseases, against which Mathias’s crew uses a liquid arsenal ranging from a fine mist of petroleum to parathion, a deadly nerve gas developed by German scientists during the Second World War.
I was also surprised to hear that “spray these oranges with nerve gas” was considered a viable pest management strategy.
On top of pests and disease, McPhee describes how the Florida environment can be surprisingly hostile for citrus trees, which are often damaged by lightning from the region’s frequent thunderstorms. High winds from these storms can also damage fruits. And, every once in a while, a freeze will descend upon Florida. If a freeze is particularly severe and long-lasting, it can wipe out a grove’s entire orange harvest.
Funny Stuff
Having never read a book as singularly focused on a topic as ubiquitous as oranges, I admit I expected this book to be drier than a California orange, but that is not the case! Throughout Oranges, McPhee sprinkles in anecdotes that I found to be both genuinely funny and interesting cultural snapshots. Here are some of the highlights.
Apple Country
While in Florida, McPhee has the following interaction with a citrus farmer:
A tractor driver gave me a ride out to my car when I left the picking crew one day, and I’ve forgotten what I said to him when I jumped up behind him, but whatever it was he turned to me and said, “You come from apple country.”
The Sons of Rest
In a section recounting the history of the Indian River, where some of Florida’s most prized oranges are grown, McPhee describes an interesting organization:
In Titusville, near Merritt Island at the north end of the river, there was a group called The Sons of Rest. Any member who was seen with perspiration on their face was fined twenty-five cents. At the end of each month, the money was used to buy a pair of overalls for the member who had worked the least.
The Frozen People
At the time of writing, frozen orange juice concentrate was quite popular across the United States, and accounted for much of the growth in Florida’s citrus industry. At one point, McPhee notes that concentrate producers in Florida are referred to as “the frozen people.”
Snake Man
During an interview, a citrus farmer describes a variety of larger pests they deal with, as well as mitigation strategies.
“There are mice, of course, and rats, and what you call land turtles (we call them gophers), and what you call gophers (we call them salamanders). There are chicken snakes, gopher snakes, and rattlesnakes. They don’t live in the groves; they just come in to eat the mice. We used to have a fellow in the crew who was called Snake Man. His real name was Walter Henderson, but no one knew it. He was a tree planter, a sprayer, a grove man. They called him Snake Man because he always caught snakes and scared the others. He couldn’t stay away from snakes. One day, Snake Man picked up a little old ground rattler and waved it at the boys. It bit him in the thumb, and the foreman told him he had to go to the hospital. Snake Man said it was nothing and he wasn’t going. They finally got him there, and his arm swelled up three times its size, and they thought he was going to die. He was in the hospital a week, and a few days after that he came back to work. When the other boys saw him, one of them called to him, ‘Hey, Snake Man, how are you?’ Snake Man stopped, and he looked at the whole bunch of them, and he said, ‘My name is Walt.’”
The Spreading Decline
Early in the book, McPhee describes a disease called “the spreading decline.” He writes:
The nematode feeds on small roots and increasingly cuts off the food supply of the tree, which dies slowly, from the top down, as more and more skeletal branches appear each year and the amount of fruit steadily decreases. When people in Florida are feeling depressed and miserable with some unspecific malady, they sometimes tell one another that they have the spreading decline. Since no one has yet found a way to kill the nematodes without killing the tree, decline brings economic disaster. Whole groves of affected trees and a surrounding margin of healthy trees often have to be bulldozed into a great pyre and burned; after the land they stand on is fumigated, it must be left empty for three years.
I realize these are different afflictions spread by different vectors, but going into this book I was aware of citrus greening disease and how it has decimated the Florida citrus industry since the early 2000s. I don’t think this is the perfect description, but reading about the severity of the spreading decline felt sort of like foreshadowing to me. It was just a bit eerie reading all about this thriving industry that I knew only exists now as a shadow of what it was at the time of McPhee’s writing.