Book Report: Thoughts on John McPhee & Oranges

Read, Relax, Respire

The restorative pleasure  of reading (and by this, I do not mean scrolling to find the perfect emoji to express your feelings) is often overshadowed by  the noise of current events. When we are in a state of crisis, we become swept up by  the seductive pull of social media platforms and  headlines from our favored news sources so that it requires an effort to pick up any other reading material. 

Escapism into fantasy and romance literature certainly has its attractions. But sometimes nonfiction in the form of exploring a topic provides a refreshing break. And I submit that John McPhee is a master of this genre. Wikipedia will describe his works  as a gentler, more literary style of writing that more thoroughly incorporated techniques from fiction. None of that intoxicating but manic prose of Hunter Thompson or the more needle-witted style of Tom Wolfe. At 93, McPhee is still writing engaging nonfiction, I just checked and his latest book Tabula Rasa was published in 2023. He’s been writing for The New Yorker for decades, and many of his books started as essays for the magazine. but then he gets so enamored with his subject, he writes a captivating book about it. And the lucky reader goes along for the ride, if only for a few hours. 

Ready For Its Close Up

And so it is with Oranges, a book he had published in 1967. Yes, the information is a bit dated. But reading through the book becomes a  pleasurable dance between the fruit’s history and the complex saga of Florida’s orange concentrate powerhouse.  Its demise was unknown at the time. He chronicles the rise of orange juice as a staple for the American post-war breakfast, woven into the historical tapestry of this fruit. 

The orange itself is another gastronomic treasure from southeast Asia that traveled to the Mediterranean through Persian traders, most likely in the fourth century BC. But these oranges were sour, and their juice was used as condiment, with the oil from the peel for aroma. The sweet orange varieties that we know today are infertile hybrids of the pomelo and a mandarin developed in China and introduced to Europe in the 15th century.

 I was surprised to find out that our oranges are grafted onto lemon or sour orange root stock. I actually tried my luck with an orange tree, along with a lemon tree, hauling them onto our terrace in the spring and then back into the living room in the early winter. Lemons were abundant, but the orange ended up looking like a prop in a Tim Burton film, and slowly, oh so slowly died, with three shriveled specimens still hanging from its branches. 

Apparently Louis XIV had much better luck with his absolutely huge Orangerie  (which became the envy of many other European ruling families). He had the largest collection of orange trees in Europe, many of them “given” to him by his courtiers and visiting royalty. But what  Louis loved were the blossoms with their intense perfume. According to McPhee, his gardeners withheld water and nutrients from the trees, until they were near death, and when the King was planning a visit, the trees were watered and fed abundantly and they would burst forth into bloom. Apparently they did this in rotation so that the Sun King could have orange blossoms year round. Nice for him, but I pity the plants. 

There are many other interesting historical facts cleverly woven into Oranges, but McPhee himself spent a lot of time studying the more contemporary Florida orange industry. As someone who was raised on frozen orange juice concentrate – I remember opening the cans and adding three cans of water to the concentrate in a plastic container, then shaking it (with lid firmly attached) until the juice was mixed. I remember recipes for cakes and muffins that were developed in which you had to use orange juice concentrate. They were pretty good.

John McPhee starts out his book with a description of purchasing freshly squeezed orange juice at a train station in New York City. Not quite an epiphany, but this fresh juice reverie inspired the book.   During his sojourns  in Florida, he never could get a glass of fresh orange juice, only canned from concentrate. Fascinating. He was told that no one liked fresh orange juice, it just was not done. As a counterpoint to the Floridian distaste for juice outside of concentrate, my husband’s mother, who  worked full time and was an incredible cook with very little money to spend on groceries, made only fresh orange juice. She had a citrus juicer attachment on her trusty Sunbeam mixer, and I remember having freshly squeezed orange juice routinely at her house. 

I was fascinated by the trouble, engineering, and specialized agriculture that went into Florida’s orange concentrate production. What had to be added in to the concentrate once the water was removed to make it look and taste (somewhat) like the real thing. To quote the author:

“Orange juice is not orange juice. It is a product of the orange. It has been altered and manipulated, stripped down and built back up again.”

Once the concentrate was processed,  leftover rinds were not completely wasted.  Peel extract was sold to Coca Cola to give it that slight citrus flavor, and also for animal feed. Occasionally spirits such as an orange-based rum were made. Groves, miles long and wide, were the makers of fortunes in frozen concentrate. State and federally funded weather forecasters, research teams, and advertising agencies kept this seemingly invincible morning drink in a secure market position. In contrast to Louis XIV, McPhee comments,

“In the orange-growing regions of Florida, people are so used to the smell of orange blossoms that they don’t even notice it. They do, however, notice the smell when something goes wrong in the concentrate plant.”

Not From Concentrate

Until one day, the term NFC became the new trend. Just as Americans believed that the Vitamin C from juice was healthy after WWII, we became alarmed at the high sugar content, colorants and other additives that were necessary for fruit concentrates. All Natural, Organic, Cold Pressed became the new slogans that we looked for in our grocery aisles.

Mother Nature, who does not like to be messed with, also played a role in the demise of Florida’s orange concentrate dominance. Hurricanes have certainly devastated thousands of orange groves, but more so, the disease caused by an Asian aphid that has invaded orange groves, called  the Citrus Greening Disease. There is no cure or preventative yet. 

My current reflection, though, remembering Dorothy Dell Remington, with her freshly squeezed orange juice in small glasses for breakfast, in the midst of our frozen concentrate frenzy, is that in Italy, spremuta d’arancia (their term for  squeezed orange juice) is as common as cappuccino. Almost every bar offers it any time of the day. In the winter you often can get it with blood oranges or mixed in with freshly squeezed pomegranate juice (delicious, by the way). I see grocery stores with spremuta machines too. You don’t drink a quart; you drink a small, potent glass. And it’s refreshing, rich, and real. Long live NFC and John McPhee!