Count me in as an OJ fan. No,not that OJ? Him I can’t even bear to think about. Fortunately – unless he shoots up in some news report and I can’t get to the remote fast enough – there is no reason to think about him. But there is, apparently, reason to think about OJ-OJ. As in orange juice.
I don’t drink a ton of juice, but I generally have some on hand. What’s in the fridge now is apple cider and a bottle of white grape juice. The cider is a relatively recent acquisition, but the grape juice has been there for a while. And every once in a while, I pour myself a small glass. Yummy. Cider I’ll have on hand through Christmas.
But I do have orange juice pretty regularly. Mostly Tropicana. During the colder months, I almost always have oranges and/or clementines around to snack on. And at Christmas, I bake orange-chocolate pound cake, which requires juice oranges, which aren’t as easy to come by as navel oranges, but which are far superior when it comes to juicy-ness.
Growing up, we almost always had oranges in the house and almost always had OJ. When I was really young, my mother squeezed her own with a juice press. But soon enough modernity took over and ours was made from frozen concentrate: Minute Maid. I still remember the intense taste of that concentrate that you got when you licked the spatula used to spatch all the concentrate out of the can.
Sometimes my mother made us frozen orange-juice pops – cheaper than paying for store-bought – which were pretty darned good.
So, oranges: yay!
But there’s a big nay! going on down in the Sunshine State, where the orange groves are being wiped out
Ninety percent of the state’s groves are infected by a bacterium called huang long bing [translation: yellow dragon sickness], which, like oranges, originated in China. The pathogen often prevents raw green fruit from ripening, a symptom called citrus greening. Even when the fruit does ripen, it sometimes drops to the ground before it can be picked. Under Florida law, citrus that falls from a tree untouched cannot be sold.
As the state prepares for the November to May harvest, thousands of growers have already quit, leaving “ghost groves” in their wake. More than 7,000 farmers grew citrus in 2004; since then, nearly 5,000 have dropped out. (Source: Washington Post)
Down to roughly 2,000 from 7,000? That is some industry hit. And I imagine those “ghost groves” look pretty forlorn. I remember being in Ireland after their housing collapse, and going by “ghost estates” full of partially built houses, Tyvek and plastic window coverings flapping in the breeze. Abandoned cement mixers and wheelbarrows sitting around abandoned lots. Depressing.
More depressing, of course, if you’re one of the nearly 5,000 citrus dropouts. Not to mention those who’ve lost their jobs as the industry – the state’s second largest, after tourism – and an industry that produces 80% of the orange juice in this country, has gone bust.
About two-thirds of the factories that processed fruit to juice have shut down. The number of packing operations – which make oranges, tangerines and grapefruit look polished for picky buyers – has nosedived from nearly 80 to 26. And 34,000 jobs were eliminated in the 10 years up to 2016, according to a University of Florida study.
Fortunately, the University of Florida does more than monitor job-loss stats. University of Florida researchers, as well as other research groups, are:
…frantically trying to develop new root stocks to create trees that can better tolerate disease and genetically engineer new types of oranges to replace traditional varieties that are more vulnerable.
So far, the best “cure” for what ails Florida citrus groves is to get rid of the existing trees and start from scratch with more disease-resistant varieties. Which is a costly endeavor.
Some fear that, within the next 15 years or so, the Florida orange industry will have disappeared.
There will still be orange juice, of course. It’s just that the oranges won’t come from Florida. (I hope we don’t end up with that ghastly European “orange juice.” Watery, green, bitter. Yuck!)
But the idea of Florida without orange juice is like a Florida without sunshine.
Of course, with the sea levels rising, it’s just a matter of time before Florida becomes one disappeared alligator-infested swamp. The end of the orange industry may be the least of their – and our – worries.
But folks are resilient, and the Florida orange industries did manage to survive having Anita Bryant as their spokesperson. So there’s that.
Meanwhile, thanks to rising temperatures, the “yellow dragon sickness” will be making its way north. Not clear whether it will start moving in on other crops, but if I were a Georgia peach farmer, I’d be on the lookout.
No comments:
Post a Comment