(I was wondering if climate change would be mentioned, but that doesn't seem to be critical there yet. Starting to be noticed in European grape terroir.)
> Hurricanes turned out to be a vector for spreading the little winged bug. The wind carried the psyllid all over the state, dropping it off in hundreds of thousands of acres of groves.
> It was the perfect storm. And then, of course, there were the actual perfect storms, the high-caliber hurricanes that, before climate change, didn’t come to the Ridge: Irma, Ian, Milton, massive cells, all direct hits on the groves.
That's not correct: we have good data going back to 1851:
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.htm...
Search for "FL": hurricanes have been hitting Florida frequently for the last 175 years.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/state-summary/FL
You get a similar problem with saltwater intrusion where, yes, it's never not been a phenomenon but now it's affecting a lot more people than it used to:
https://southeastfloridaclimatecompact.org/initiative/climat...
This is the conventional wisdom, and it is completely falsified by the actual data that I linked to. I wrote a python script to go process and plot it, and there has been zero increase in Cat 1, 2, 3, or 4 storms hitting the US since 1851 (there are only 4 Cat 5s listed total).
Try it for yourself.
It seems many are jumping to biases about climate change without reviewing the data as you did.
And the article should've been written with more nuance.
Now, I see a slate of historical hurricanes in FL from 2004-05 that hit the Ridge area. This contradicts the article as these weren't baby storms.
The issue is clearly the rise of this blight bacteria that has made the groves less resilient to storms and has weakend production.
The idea that climate change caused hurricanes which spread insects is not impossible but seems unlikely. I don't think the statistical methods exist to prove it.
I love the stories about people in FL self-insuring now because it's cheaper to repair drywall than pay premiums.
> the high-caliber hurricanes that, before climate change, didn’t come to the Ridge
These recent storms only got to Cat4.
Similar storms hit the aforementioned areas in 2004-05 including Cat4.
How do these revelations not contradict the article?
Have you ever had "banana flavor" candy that doesn't really taste like bananas? The flavoring is Isoamyl acetate, and I've heard suggestion that people called it banana flavor because it tasted more like Gros Michel. After switching to Cavendish banana the flavor name no longer made as much sense. Not sure how true it is though.
I still love tiny red bananas though, they are so sweet!
IIRC, there was actually a huge marketing push because people wouldn't each the current variety ?
PS - the old one didn't go 100% extinct, and you can get small numbers of them from specialty growers. Youtube has videos of people trying them (1)
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-we-should-br...
In the US the Interstate system helped reduce shipping and logistic costs across state lines, and so oranges became more prevalent and less 'special' post-WW2.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2020/04/fruit-trenches-cul...
I've always wanted to try it in my own cold environment.
Granny Smith and Pink Lady were also considered treats when it came to apples, compared to the usual golden delicious or braeburn.
Florida was a beautiful place not long ago, but a very peculiar and aggressively anti indigenous development is redefining it daily. Things have become so strange that squalid retention ponds qualify as wetland restoration.
I could rant for a while, but won't. Sarasota once produced more celery than possibly all states combined, and that helped us get through the Depression locally. But we sure did grow some oranges, and how wonderful the scent of orange blossoms are. It's something to behold.
Floridians deserve the results.
I will grant clemency for anyone who was born there and isn’t wealthy enough to move out.
I will grant 10x hate for anyone who moved there for the politics and complains about the results.
I'm also curious whether the bugs would survive if you cut down every orange tree in Florida, waited a couple of years, and then planted new groves.
They still grow millions of pineapples
Jones Act doesn't accomplish what it's supposed to do but that's mainly because it was weak protectionism. Many other countries just shovel government money into their shipbuilding at rates that would probably make many just as angry.
It doesn't help that the US is full of non-contiguous territory separated by deep ocean. Other countries have similar laws but aren't as impacted.
Of note from the story: "...because it came from China, where oranges also came from in the first place." Technically yes but also no, what we have for the modern navel orange came from a mutation that happened in Brazil in the 1800s - 200 years after its introduction from China. The parent trees for literally the entire navel orange (aka Florida aka Sunkist orange) industry are in Riverside, CA, I see them every day driving to work. The now-deceased Queen of England used to get two boxes of oranges from those very trees every year.
Juice oranges have a tougher, thinner rind that doesn't peel easily, and they have seeds. But they have better taste and more juice than navel oranges.
I am halfway convinced that flavor wise frozen concentrated orange juice is "closer to the tree" than the "never concentrated" stuff. Nothing on fresh squeezed. But that is the price we pay to have a non-seasonal product.
The fun part was trying to find good estimates for viscosity for the two phase orange sludge in order to properly size the piping and pumps. Treating food products like chemical production is its own weird sub-specialty.
As for Minute Maid, it has always tasted awful to me and it tasted worse in the 80s. The only packaged OJ I can stand is Tropicana.
You push the white lever and juice comes out. In grocery shops it's customer operated.
OXO Good Grips runs about $20, it's a squeeze-by-hand option. You can get a wooden reamer, or spend about or upwards of a Franklin for something complicated, though I find simpler is saner.
Minute maid actually tastes better than Tropicana to me (can't stand that brand), been getting one from Spain lately at Costco (Don Simon) that's pretty good, less sweet.
I have never liked Tropicana or Minute Maid, but about... 30 years ago? We used to have a brand called Fruvita that actually tasted good but it got bought by Tropicana, the taste changed, and we just stopped buying orange juice.
Fresh squeezed is amazing.
THEY ARE DELICIOUS when you can find them, one of the things I miss about living in California was the brief season you could get a concord grape on the vine to eat. I have never seen them outside a bay area farmer's market, late summer if I remember correctly.
If I knew for sure when they would be available I'd certainly make a trip across the country to eat those limes.
That said, "delicious" is definitely a matter of opinion.
Nothing like a fresh Florida orange, though. I used to know a secret tree in a public preserve that had the best oranges known to man.
I might drive down this winter and see if it's still there.
Simply is definitely the superior of their product lines.
Of course they discontinued the angus burgers that actually used high quality ingredients compared to the McDouble / quarter pounders.
Now it’s $12 for a double quarter pounder meal and it tastes like shit. I only notice this because I just didn’t eat there much in the last 15 years. Meat quality and bun quality has clearly gotten worse. I don’t know how they keep growing sales.
(Variation on: <https://www.smart-words.org/jokes/giraffe-refrigerator-eleph...>.)
Alternatively, use an apple-corer to breach the peel, pour in a shot of vodka, and drink with a straw, much as with watermelon:
<https://www.thespruceeats.com/vodka-watermelon-recipe-417556...>.
You’re probably better off drinking cane sugar soda because it is more filling than HFCS soda.
Anyway orange juice is probably better still. At least it has some vitamin C and maybe trace fiber in it.
So does sugar. Everything ever credibly published on the effects of artificial sweeteners say four things:
1) everything else held equal, artificial sweeteners unequivocally reduce weight gain vs consuming equivalent sugar because sugar is 100% empty calories
2) some artificial sweeteners (e.g. sucralose) may increase appetite vs equivalent sugar, causing you to possibly eat more depending on which ones you consume
3) various artificial sweeteners may have non-weight-related negative effects on the body related to cardiovascular health, gut health, and so on
4) sugar definitely has a whole bunch of non-weight-related negative effects on the body related to cardiovascular health, gut health, and so on
Simple sugars are particularly effective at restoring glycogen stores after intense cardiovascular workouts.
Lumping simple sugar in with complex carbohydrates as equally beneficial because they're both carbohydrate molecules is horrendous prevarication. And bringing up "intense workouts" at all, which I'm sure you very well know is demographically an extreme outlier scenario, in a conversation about weight gain, is the most hilarious kind of derailment.
> However, given this study applied a heterogeneous ASB formula, it could not adequately consider the role of specific artificial sweeteners. Further research is needed to evaluate the potential effect of different artificial sweeteners and their doses on health.
Sugar, on the other hand, has very well known and studied health risks at the concentrations we see in a lot of modern 'staples' - soda and juice included.
I have not seen a single double blind study show this in the many decades low calorie sweeteners have been consumed (in normal amounts).
What I have seen is study after study showing the harms of consuming too many carbohydrates (the amounts contained in normal consumption of juice due to quantity of sugar).
A solution here could be growing a larger variety of produce, using organic farming practices, crop rotation, etc. Pests tend to specialize in specific things and most pests have natural predators. So, if you stop killing those they'll help keep outbreaks in check. And if you rotate crops, you take away the food source for the pests. And if you grown a variety of different things, it won't all get sick at the same time.
The article in Time Magazine puts it succinctly:
> There’s a name for this situation: monoculture, the practice of fostering just one variety of something.
In the case of bananas (and many other crops, plants, decorative trees, etc), a diversity of varieties would have minimized the spread and impact of pathogens, while providing a more diverse selection of nutritional content and flavor for consumers. But that doesn't seem to be the case for citrus trees.
I don't think that "monoculture", as it has been used or the past 50+ years, is the appropriate concept to apply to this citrus greening. Perhaps we could criticize something else - like tree density? Or perhaps monoculture is the problem, but in a much broader sense - maybe a grove with 10% citrus trees, 10% corn, 10% soybeans, 10% berries, 10% apple trees, etc...would create a biome that was hostile to the citrus greening bacteria in such a way that it couldn't thrive and spread. We have no data to support that hypothesis at this time though.
0: "What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana" https://time.com/5730790/banana-panama-disease/
But when you have nothing but the perfect host for the infection, in incredibly massive proportions as far as the eye can see, a little bacteria goes a long way.
Which can be even worse :(
