A Sweet & Sour Story

Consider the orange. At seventy million metric tons per year, it is the most widely produced tree fruit in the world, beating even the apple. It is now found everywhere, usually in the form of breakfast juice.

This common fruit has a most exotic and well-traveled past, however. The wild parent, C. aurantium, is native to southeast Asia; its name derives from the Sanskrit nareng. It seems to have been cultivated early in China and valued for the distinctive fragrance of its peel. Old Chinese texts describe warming oranges in the hands to release their scent.