Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Lemons

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why lemons are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the new SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Lemons. Known for being yellow. Famous for being lemony. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why lemons are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode for this new year. It's a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt, and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, what is your relationship to or opinion of lemons? I love lemons. I have a lemon tree. I've never gotten a single good lemon out of it. So the poor little lemon tree has been through a lot. I've been learning how to take care of it. I realized last year that you're supposed to not let it freeze in the winter.

So I am now bringing it indoors. Another issue is that if it gets too hot in the drought, it also doesn't like that. in the drought. It also doesn't like that. So I've been bringing it indoors in both the winter and in the really hot summer months. So it's like, it's kind of like an indoor outdoor elementary. It fits in a pot. So it's not like a whole, I don't have a yard. So it's, it's like in a pot and it lives on my balcony right now. It lives in my living room fantastic it had like a lemon on it and then it like froze in the winter last last year and kind of turned black and i don't think that was i don't think that was um good so we'll see we'll see what happens this year i am feeding it a lot of water, some citrus plant fertilizer.

It's indoors. Wrapped it up in a little jacket. Read it bedtime stories. Maybe this year is the year for my lemon tree to actually make an edible lemon. What a thing. I didn't know this was part of your life in Italy. It's a struggle, yeah. Also, in researching, I kept finding people talking about either Italy, your location, or California, where you're from.

And those are two of the prime lemon growing regions in the world. Top lemon areas. Yeah. Yeah. Technically, I don't think where I live in Italy is a big lemon region, which might be why I'm struggling so much with this lemon plant, because I'm in northern Italy. Which might be why I'm struggling so much with this lemon plant, because I'm in northern Italy. I think that most of the lemon activity happens in southern Italy, which makes a lot of sense given that their winters are not that cold. And so the lemon tree freezing to death is not as much of a peril down there.

So, you know, but I'm trying to make it work. I'm rooting for you and your tree. This is great. It's interesting because although it has never borne any viable lemons, it has, it has leaves, but then it has like one really, really big leaf, like bigger than the rest of the leaves and really green and healthy looking. bigger than the rest of the leaves and really green and healthy looking. And it seems like its strategy has been to invest all of its excess energy into this one huge mega leaf, which I find interesting. Why many leaf when one leaf do trick? Right. Like Kevin would say on the U.S. office. Yeah.

Right. It's a sad little Charlie Brown tree that's like one big leaf. We're putting it all, putting all of our resources into big leaf. Oh, and the Charlie Brown tree element. Now I'm right back at Christmas. Feels great. Thank you. Wow. I definitely, my first exposure to lemons was Sprite, which is not really the lemon experience, but I just thought, yeah, lemons, limes. They're the soda fruits. Great. Cool. Lemons, limes. Yeah. I, um, my first, I feel like lemonade was my first sort of exposure to lemons. Oh, I forgot about lemonade. Apologies to lemonade. Have you heard of that deadly lemonade that Panera has? It's really terrible. They have like a-

Deadly? Yeah, they have like a lemonade that is another sort of fruit juice type things that has a bunch of caffeine in it, like a huge amount of caffeine. Oh, so not poison. I i thought poison but you just mean really powerful i mean caffeine is a drug and like if you od on it it's really bad for you i think like a couple people have been killed by this lemonade wow because yeah no it's serious i think that the problem with this lemonade is you you shouldn't have a drink that's like right on basically is full of the daily maximum caffeine that you should have. Because if someone has it or has two or something or has a caffeine sensitivity and it's not like super clearly labeled, like this is almost a lethal

amount of caffeine on it. Right. I feel really bad for people who have been hurt by this like deadly lemonade. Like why, why make your lemonade so dangerous? It doesn't make any sense to me. Lemonade is great. Well, I'm sure the Panera business is some sort of aggressive biker bar or fight club. So that's why you need the energy. Googling Panera. Oh, it's a sandwich shop. Calm down, guys. Guys, sandwiches and soup. Chill out.

Calm down. My God. Calm down with your like almost lethal lemonade that if someone accidentally drinks too much of or too fast. Yeah, it's not cool. Yeah. So this topic is vast. And thank you to Brenda Young for the suggestion. Hey, Lemon.

Yeah, we don't. And this topic is so vast, Lemonade could be a whole nother episode. Just lemons. There's a lot here. And most weeks we start with stats and numbers. But this week there's a first big takeaway about what a lemon is. And takeaway number one. Lemons are the hybrid of a sour fruit for marmalade and a hard to eat proto citrus with religious significance.

Whoa. A Jesus fruit? A Jewish fruit, basically. Oh, okay. All right. I'm not very good at Judaism. I have, my dad's family is Jewish, but I am, I don't know what this fruit is. So.

This is also, it's primarily still a thing with like Orthodox communities and only some Jewish folks. And it's tied to the holiday Sukkot. Okay. The one ancestor here is called a Citron. And then in Hebrew, it's an Etrog is the word. Okay. But it's sort of old fashioned and not done by everybody is what I read. Okay.

So. Yeah. Easy to miss. Yeah. I'm not religious. So like, I'm basically just like, yeah, Passover. Yeah. Christmas. And then I just eat the food and I don't think at all about anything. So that's the interest. So citron, it's a, it's a fruit that has been used in a religious context. Yeah, that's one ancestor. And then a citrus called sour oranges is the other.

Those two combine to make lemons. Whoa. This is really the whole botanical and biological history of lemons, but also how citrus spread across the world. Huh. It's much weirder than I would have expected to just find out where lemons come from. That's, yeah. So I've heard of definitely like, there's a lot of orange trees in Southern Italy and in, I think, Greece as well, where they look beautiful, but you can't really eat them. They're like very bitter.

And they're very appealing to like birds. But for humans, like if you just eat an orange from one of these trees, it's like super bitter. It's not pleasant. Is this like the same thing, like a bitter orange tree? Yeah, it's either the same or similar because like we're about to talk about there's, bajillion is not a number, but there's tons of citrus types. Bajillion is not a number, but there's tons of citrus types. The sour orange is also called a bitter orange or a Seville orange, named after a different part of the Mediterranean there. But in human use, we can eat that very bitter fruit, but we tend to just use it to make marmalade.

Right. Where the recipe is that fruit, a bunch of sugar, and maybe water for the texture. Right. And that is to make sandwiches for Paddington. Yeah. I'm going to link two different internet recipes imitating what they think Paddington's recipe for marmalade is. And it's these sour oranges. It's one of the two parents of lemons. That's adorable. I love that. I'm sure marmalade makers knew this, but when I would watch the Paddington movies, I would think he's grabbing navel oranges and loves that. But no, it was always a sour, different orange that has a flavor and a texture much closer to a lemon eating wise.

Right. And so it makes a good marmalade. I actually don't eat a lot of marmalade. Paddington does make me want to reconsider. He makes his sandwiches look so good. He's so cute. Yeah. And the world of citrus is extremely weird. And there's a long, long ago SIF episode about grapefruits where this came up, because that's the only other citrus that's been a topic. The key sources for this takeaway are a piece for National Geographic, a piece for the Washington Post, and then a book called Lemon, a Global History by journalist and food writer Toby Sonneman. They all say that all citrus fruits are descended from hybrids and rehybrids of three wild citrus species.

There are three species of citrus fruits, all from a specific region of East and Southeast Asia that led to all of the rest of the citrus, including lemons. That's really interesting. And one of them is the citron, which we'll describe in a sec. And the others are the pomelo and the mandarin. Okay. I'm familiar with pomelos and mandarins. Okay. I'm familiar with pomelos and mandarins. Yeah, this lemon topic's fun because I think citrons are by far the least familiar to people. Right. But all three of these are still grown and exist. It's not like they were some distant ancestor that's useless. They just led to more fruit.

Do citrons have anything to do with citronella candles? Do citrons have anything to do with citronella candles? They have a similar name, and the name is probably related to citrons being amazing at a fragrance that's similar to the lemon fragrance we like. They are considered basically inedible, except for that you can take the rind and candy it and put it in stuff like panettone and fruitcake. But they're also really prized for their very good scent. And citronella is different, but also a good smelling thing from grasses. Yeah. It's also for keeping bees and mosquitoes away. Yeah, that's interesting.

They use it in panettone cake, which I do not like. I do not care for it. The boxes are always so pretty and I want to like it and it looks so good. And then every time I try, I'm like, nah, this is not the cake for me. I'm not a fan. Yeah, that stuff and Toblerone both make me feel like Europe is very advanced at boxes. I'm like, good job. Wow.

We're not on that level. I'll mess with a Toblerone. I like Toblerone. But yeah, Panettone, good job. Wow. We're not on that level. I'll mess with a Toblerone. I like Toblerone. But yeah, Panettone, they're so good. Like the boxes are amazing, but the taste of the cake I do not like. I'm not that into it either. Yeah. So I maybe have eaten a piece of citron rind before, but I don't eat a lot of it. Yeah.

Yeah. And these three fruits, pomelos are around, mandarins are around. All three of the fruits originate from an area near the southern Himalaya mountains in parts of what's now India and Myanmar and China. There's also paleontological digs in modern China that found fossilized citrus plant leaves that are seven million years old. So for at least that long, citrus have been around and like breeding and crossbreeding with each other. That's so interesting. And so now after like all this hybridization and sort of offshoots, like how many different citrus plants do we have currently? We don't have a count and it's because they are amazing at having sex with each other in a way most other life forms on Earth aren't. Huh.

Citrus, that's the name of a genus of plants, and the entire genus is sexually compatible with itself. Whoa. All right. And this is also highly sexually active as plants go. A lot of our citrus varieties just happened initially in nature, more so than other crops we do. And then humans guide it from there. But we think grapefruits are a crossbreed of pomelos and a variety of sweet oranges that happen by accident. And then it's just because citrus really hook up well. And then we took it from there. It's a self-assured, self-having sex with very confident, liberated fruit. And we like that. Big time. Yeah. It's very sex positive.

And then the new things it makes generally can still make new things from there. It's not like many other species of life where, okay, we have a hybrid, but it can't things from there. It's not like many other species of life where, okay, we have a hybrid, but it can't do anything. So it's not a new species. Right. So it can hybridize and then that hybrid offspring can also create new offspring. Yeah. Wow. That's impressive. So citrus has really rapidly and all the time made new kinds of citrus. Wow. Wow.

Wow. Like blood oranges. Yeah. Like suddenly that can happen. And sudden in a breeding new species of things sense. Right. Yeah. That's really interesting. Yeah.

So this massive amount of reproduction, it helped create lemons. We think on its own in nature and then humans have modified them from there. But citrons are also still around. We think people have used them for at least 6,000 years. They resemble a slightly large lemon from the outside. It's that color. It's that shape. It is very lemon looking, but when you cut it open, you find it doesn't have the juicy middle that we think citrus have. It's mostly that white flesh, right? Yes, it's almost all a thick spongy white layer called an albedo

and then a little bit of green pulp and seeds in the middle and it's considered basically not edible except for using the rind and breads, like sweet breads. I feel like I've seen that in markets here. Like, I think I've seen it around and I'm always like, that looks like a huge lemon, a huge bumpy lemon. And I don't know what I would do with it. So I guess like, yeah, it would be used for probably for people making their own panettone or something. Yeah. In Italy, that's probably why you would see it year round. That and in the past, especially people used it for the fragrance. There were also a lot of incorrect but popularizing beliefs about it having amazing medicinal properties.

The extremely wrong Roman writer Pliny the Elder thought that it was an antidote to poisons and cured diseases. None of that's true, but it helped convince people to grow citrons and spread them around. I feel like we have this idea that something that's like nasty tasting or bitter or something, it's like, well, it's unpleasant to put in my mouth, so it must be good for me. Yeah, exactly. We're like pain is health. Pain is health, yeah. Bee stings is medicine. religion. And this is really in modern times is mainly Orthodox communities. But there's a fall harvest festival called Sukkot. And there's a few plants that people gather and use for a rite in honoring the 40 years Jewish people wandered the desert after expulsion from Egypt. And one

of them is you want to have one really unblemished and perfect looking citron. is you want to have one really unblemished and perfect looking citron. I feel like all the citrons look blemished. Yeah. Because they're super lumpy. I don't, what do they mean by unblemished? Just like no brown spots, no green spots, because they are super lumpy and bumpy. Yeah, and that becomes the challenge. There are apparently a few modern stories of people paying massive prices to get one astonishingly nice-looking citron because the rest are so bumpy and lumpy, and they want to have that as a status symbol for the holiday. Whoa.

Lamborghini of citrons. Yeah, Lamborghini, yeah. of citrons. Yeah, lemongini, yeah. And the citron is basically for this ritual. And so there's generations of farmers who did what I almost think of as raising turkeys toward Thanksgiving Day, like specifically growing citrons for this one festival. And Toby Sonneman's book says that there's a Yiddish phrase to describe the general concept of something with no value. And the Yiddish phrase is a citron after Sukkot. Oh, that's funny.

Like the day after the holiday, we can throw these out. They're not interesting anymore. Christmas tree after Christmas. Yeah, this fruit, it sort of just pops up in specific places for specific reasons. And it is much lesser known than the lemon today, but it's part of the origin of it. And it's one of the three fruits that led to all citrus ever. So it's a really foundational fruit to human society. Apparently, in Roman Empire times, at the fall of Jerusalem, and when people were expelled from it, Jewish people went all over the Roman Empire and grew citrus in various places because they knew how to do it from stuff like citrons.

Clearly not my family. My family didn't get the memo. Yeah. You missed out on this fruit I described as basically inedible. Oh no. It's very honestly kind of like the next time I see one, I might want to get one just because it looks like very interesting texturally. I'm a fidgeter. Like I love to fidget. I actually, like I have like basically a, a like massage comb in my hands right now because like I always have to be fidgeting with stuff and I like things with interesting textures. So I feel like one of these would be really interesting to just like hold and like fidget with because it's like looks like it has a really interesting kind of lumpy texture. Seems like it'd smell nice. Seems I can spell nice.

So I feel like I'm just going to like get one of these and like carry it around with me until it goes like bad, which, you know, I don't know. Brett's going to like that. I do that. Yeah. No, I mean, it looks it's very like I don't know. For some reason, it's very appealing to me. Just looks interesting. I'm sure it smells interesting.

I can see why there's this sort of mysticism or religiosity behind it. I get it. Right. Especially in the past when you don't have modern manufacturing of bright things or of candy. Like just having this truly shining yellow orb of a fruit. It's like really, really pretty looking. It looks like a super lemon from the outside. And so, yeah, of course it got used in rituals and drew people's attention. Yeah.

And so that's where lemons come from. And then from here, our next fascinating thing about the topic is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And that's in a segment called Favorite Adverb Secretly, Favorite Drink O'Douls, Stats, Numbers, Socks, Bulls. And that name was submitted by J Smooks on the Discord. Thank you for the Chicago thing. We have a new name for this every week. Please make it as silly and wacky and bad as possible. Submit through Discord or to sifpod at gmail.com. That sounded like a Russian doing like English language rap to me. It's supposed to be like a in his mid-50s Chicago guy. So I probably said it funny.

No, but I mean, I think it's similar. I think there is some crossover between middle-aged Chicago guy and... And Eastern Europe. Yeah, for sure. And Eastern Europe. Yeah, for sure. And Eastern Europe. Yeah. Look, you know, the world is small. We all, we're all interconnected somehow through the power of rap.

Big time. It's a, it's a parody of the song Dennehy by the rapper Serengeti, if people want to hear it. It's great. The numbers here, there's just a few and they're all really weird uses of lemons. The first number is more than 100 years. The oldest lemon. This reminds me of your citron dream a little bit.

More than 100 years is how long the UK National Archives held onto a lemon. Oh, fantastic. From the trial of a German spy. Oh, interesting. Was it a spy lemon? Like have a little camera inside of it? Almost. It was used to make invisible ink.

Oh, right. For writing messages to Berlin for the Germans in World War I. I've heard about this trick. You write it in lemon juice, and then you get it. You hold it up to a candle. You apply some heat, and then you can see the message. Precisely. I think I tried doing that once as a candle, you apply some heat, and then you can see the message. Precisely. I think I tried doing that once as a kid and it did not work, but maybe I didn't use the right concentration of lemon juice. I don't know.

Yeah, apparently lemon juice is a great main thing for invisible ink. And if you add a little bit of onion juice or a little bit of something solid but pale. The paper looks like it doesn't have anything on it. And then you can send messages to the Kaiser in World War I or other purposes. I'll allow any purpose. This was a World War I spy? Yeah, a German spy in Britain. Yeah. I see. And they used this very lemon to send messages? Or was this like a lemon used by a lawyer in trial to be like, look at this lemon. Now look at my client. Do they look the same to you? No, then you must acquit. If the lemon doesn't fit, you must acquit. Right. I kind of feel like it's that ridiculous because how do you prove it was the specific lemon for the writing? In my source, Geographic, and also the UK National Archives,

the implication is somehow they proved it was the lemon used to write Invisible Ink messages. Like, they found it in an incriminating location or something. What's in, like, his, was it in his butt? Like, what do you mean an incriminating location? Probably his apartment or whatever. But yeah. But that's a normal place to have a lemon. That's why it's kind of partly the perfect crime for Invisible Inc.

Right, I'm cooking. Get off it. Yeah, I try to keep lemons around. That was the whole point of me getting this lemon tree that hasn't borne any fruit, was so that I could always have a lemon around. But now that dream's been crushed. So I have to go to the store to get my lemons. And now you're going to say I'm like a German spy or something. Cooking is complicated. Yeah, this was a pretty intense war situation because World War I breaks out in 1914. And the next year, British intelligence says we've caught a group of German spies. And they became specifically known in the

newspapers for their invisible ink messages written in lemon juice. They got written up as lemon juice spies. One story described them as sending messages, quote, in lemon. It was all like these diabolical Germans with their lemons. We must stop them. I feel like given that this was World War I, it's like we were so innocent to think that the Germans would only be so diabolical as to like, oh, their lemon plot. How diabolical. Yeah, right. And also, let's not think about the trenches. Let's think about a funny

lemon thing that's just easier. And yeah, in the trial of a German spy named Karl Müller, authorities presented one of his lemons as evidence of his crimes. They were like, see, he had a lemon. Did they put the lemon on the stand and then

squeeze it? Did they put the lemon on the stand and then squeeze it? Did they squeeze the lemon? And yeah, the Muller and 10 other spies became the first people executed at the Tower of London in more than 150 years of history. And the UK National Archives held on to the evidence lemon. They have a picture of it on their website. It just looks like a black lump at this point. Like it's done as a fruit. Just like my lemons. It's going to be like your citron. Just like the lemons that grow on my tree. No, they look like, I had a, basically it started to grow a lemon and then something went wrong and it became sort of a black sphere.

So I feel this lemon. Oh, poor tree. Yeah. Poor tree. It tries so hard. It's like, what if I make a really big leaf? Will that make you happy? And with lemons trying to do their best, the next number is 2,923. 2,923. Okay.

That is the number of lemons that were used to build a record setting battery. Because you can use a lemon to make a battery. But if folks have heard our episode about batteries, we talk about the parts of a battery. The lemon folks have heard our episode about batteries, we talk about the parts of a battery. The lemon is only the middle section, the highly acidic section, and lemons have a bunch of acid. So you need two pieces of metal that are different and will exchange ions, and then the lemon can be the middle. That's how a lemon can be part of a battery. Right. I've seen potato batteries. Is that the same idea as like the potato has some acid on the inside? Yeah, it's a middle medium for ion exchange.

Yeah. I've also seen lemon batteries. Why would you use so many lemons to make a giant battery when you could use them for making like spy ink or deadly lemonade. Right. You could be running the worst Padera in the world, but no. Right. No, this was the Royal Society of Chemistry in the UK working with a professor in Bath, England. They wanted to set the world record for the biggest and most powerful lemon battery.

Always for the clout. for the biggest and most powerful lemon battery. It's always for the clout. But their battery, made of 2,923 lemons, only generated 2,307 volts of electricity. So less than one volt per lemon. It's not a powerful way to do energy. It doesn't seem very efficient.

When was this? And this was 2021. Oh, this is recent. So also I think everybody was cooped up and going crazy you know yeah that sounds like a project that you know if you're like look i don't know what to do with myself i've already learned how to crochet painted by numbers let's do something freaky with lemons yeah let's get weird yeah And then one more number here. This is the number 1908. 1908, the year

that's when a guy named Frank Meyer found an interesting lemon tree in the town of Fengtai near Beijing in China. Meyer sounds familiar because I feel like I've heard of Meyer's Lemons and Oscar Meyer Wieners. No, no, go back, go back. One step back. Are we back to the Panera? I'm confused.

And that year number leads us into takeaway number two. And that year number leads us into takeaway number two. Meyer lemons have a weirdly messy history across two continents. The Meyer lemon, apparently particularly in modern cooking culture in the U.S., is very popular. According to Alice Obscura, there have been two big promoters of it. There's a chef in Berkeley, California named Alice Waters, who wrote a hit cookbook about it in the 80s. And then in 2003, Martha Stewart promoted it as a food and also as a tree for your garden and your home. That's wild to me that like we're promoting plant variants, like that, like there's like branded content for like a, a variant of plants that is

like, like a brand it's, it's so weird. Right. And this Meyer lemon is specific enough that people felt like there was something to promote partly because if you're super specific about the biology, some people do not consider them true lemons. They consider them a different kind of citrus. Why? The reason is they have at least a little bit of DNA from oranges. It's probably a regular lemon crossed with some oranges, but probably not half their DNA. And so that also helps explain why people are super fans of them

because they taste somewhat sweeter and somewhat different. They're a little sweeter. Yeah. They're, I mean, I feel like when I've had a Myers lemon, they're like a little sweeter and the skin is thinner. Is that, do you know if that's the case? Yeah. Like they're a little, they're easier to make, like say lemonade or, or to cook with in some ways. Not if you want, like if your recipe calls for like grating the peel, I don't think they're as good. But like the, yeah, the actual flesh is like a lot juicier, a lot sweeter in my experience. It's just like funny, like there's some like lemon purist who's like, no, this has too much orange DNA in it.

It can't be a lemon. He's like, no, this has too much orange DNA in it. It can't be a lemon. Yeah, and that is only the second biggest massive controversy around Meyer lemons. Wow. They have swept the U.S. with fear and panic before in a way people don't know today. Oh, okay. It turns out this guy, Frank Meyer, he was a Dutch person born in the late 1800s in Holland, but then he... Oh, of course.

That's what the panic was. That's why he put oranges in it, right? Dutch, orange. We got him. Dutch, orange. I don't get it. I'm not getting it. And Meyer, he was a plant explorer.

He loved to do massive hikes and wanderings all over the world finding species. And he gets a job in the early 1900s doing that for the United States Department of Agriculture. We hired this Dutch guy. And he makes his first trip to East Asia in 1905. He walks on foot for 1,800 miles across China finding plants. He wears out three pairs of boots doing it. And one find is this surprising citrus tree near Beijing, and it becomes a big hit in the U.S. Unfortunately, he dies under mysterious circumstances in 1918, possibly mental health, possibly murder. The USDA says we will never solve the mystery of Frank Meyer's death.

That's really definitive. Like, like, that makes me suspicious. Why are they like, we're sure we're never going to solve this mystery? Yeah, it feels like the Secretary of Agriculture did it. I don't know. Sorry, former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, you are accused of the murder now. You just hear crash and it's like a lemon

thrown through your window with a menacing note written in lemon juice. Oh man, that is almost exactly the topic of this week's bonus show. Actually, we'll get to it. A lemon mafia? Yeah, precisely. Okay. It's great. Stay tuned, folks. Subscribe so you can hear that. And yeah, and so Frank Meyer dies, but this fruit gets named after him and gets called a Meyer lemon. And then starting in the 1930s, it almost kills off most U.S. citrus. Oh, dear. Yeah, that's that. That was what I thought. You wouldn't do a whole new direction with like the murder thing, but I thought it

was going to be like it's an invasive species of plant that like messed up the existing. species of plant that like messed up the existing uh although i mean lemons are not native to north america but like still if you have a domesticated lemon you could still have an invasive species mess up the domesticated lemon uh so so that sounds like that's what happened yes and and not just lemons but all citrus and it was a really specific problem. It turns out there is a fruit tree disease, and it's called citrus triesteza virus, also called quick-decline virus. It will kill a tree within days if it catches it. Okay, so that's not what my sick tree has, because my sick tree has been hanging on for a while. Yeah, doing great

yeah it would it would be dead if it had this it would be gone okay that's that's good to know and it's transmitted by aphids aphids are bugs that go from tree to tree and it's not that people brought it over from asia this disease is is all over the, but the thing that limits its spread is how fast it kills a tree. Right? Like, it just wipes it out. The problem is that Meyer lemon trees specifically were asymptomatic carriers. Oh, that's so interesting. So they survived.

Yeah. They survived it, but that... Lived to spread it a bunch. But that, yeah, that caused them to breed a bunch of aphids. And then they spread that. That's really interesting. Yeah, yeah. And so suddenly there were hubs of this disease popping up all over California and the U.S.

And so then that sparked a national effort by farmers and the government to uproot and kill Meyer lemon trees. Virologists at the University of California called for their total eradication in the state. Unfortunately, some people just decided they really wanted the tree. And some politicians, such as Republican California Assemblyman Patrick D. McGee, argued that this was government overreach and tyranny to remove your Meyer lemon trees, and it's an attack on personal liberty. So we couldn't get rid of the trees.

The only solution came almost 40 years later in 1976, botanists bred a Meyer lemon tree that could not carry the virus. And so now all the Meyer lemon trees we have in the U.S. are pretty much that because that won't kill the rest of our citrus trees. It can just exist. But did it like the lag in sort of like where we because we didn't get rid of it, did that kill off any lemon tree or citrus tree species? Or just was it a continual menace to all citrus plants for a while? Just a continual menace. Yeah. Especially because a lot of our U.S. citrus was something being farmed. And so they just, there were people

actively working on the trees either way and they tried to just keep it going. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. And so that's part of why Meyer lemons feel like a recent food fad to some people is that until recently they were associated with the death of all citrus trees and it's only been okay to grow them for a few decades. When did they engineer the disease resistant ones? In the 1970s. And then this first promotion from Cook Alice Waters comes in the 1980s. I see. Okay. When the coast is clear and it makes makes sense. It's good now.

Right, right, right. Just don't look at the lemon's Wikipedia page and into its checkered past. Yeah. Let's go cancel it. We'll take a quick break. We'll cancel the tree and then we'll come back. Your

Meyer lemon is a problematic fave. Yeah, folks, that's our numbers and two takeaways. We'll come back with one more giant takeaway about lemons changing the history of the world. Wow. Is it Panera Bread again? No. Did they kill Lincoln? Well, they did that, but not with lemons, obviously.

Limes. Limes are the assassin's choice. All right, limes. Six emper, limeris. Folks, as you know, direct listener support is why this podcast exists. It is the vast, vast majority of the income that makes it possible for me to do what I do and for Katie to be on the show. The research, the editing, the effort. The only reason this exists is your support. And that support only comes from a few listeners.

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All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace because, yes, listening is mandatory.

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Whoa. One more time, because that's long. Yeah. Thanks to Native American knowledge about evergreen trees, a Scottish doctor cured scurvy and defeated Napoleon. Okay. Now, let's be clear, right? Lemons, lemon trees aren't evergreens. They're not. Yeah, this Native American knowledge is about many evergreen trees that contain some vitamin C.

Oh. But lemon trees, they lose their leaves. They're deciduous, yeah. So vitamin C does not stand for vitamin citrus? No, you would really think it would. Yeah. But no, it's shorthand for something called ascorbic acid. Ah, what?

Okay. Yeah, it's not as fun. I don't know where the vitamin letters come from. I guess vitamins would be a good episode for finding that. Let's do that topic. Yeah, vitamins. Vitamins. Okay. So that's really interesting. So there was, there was some knowledge about evergreens that informed our understanding of scurvy, which that scurvy is such like an old timey thing, right? Like it's one of those things that I think we figured out like rickets, scurvy, wandering womb syndrome. Those just don't

happen as much anymore, or we have better names for them. Yeah. Yeah. It definitely feels like wooden sailing ships 200 to 300 years ago. And it was going on then. That's real. But yeah, we figured it out. So what is scurvy? We figured it out. So what is scurvy? Scurvy is a deficiency of vitamin C, and it was horrible. And we've only fully scientifically understood it since the 1920s.

People figured out activities that happened to solve it before that, but we isolated and classified ascorbic acid, also known as vitamin C, in the 1920s. And it was such a big deal. One of the scientists won a Nobel Prize for medicine just for, they figured out vitamin C. Great. I mean, that does seem pretty important. That's not surprising to me that they would get an award for vitamin C. But yeah, so like, I guess, like my understanding of scurvy is that it would affect like sailors and stuff because they would be on a ship and they wouldn't get the normal variety of food that one might get on land. And so you'd be eating a lot of stuff that does not have vitamin C in it.

And so you get a vitamin C deficiency and then your teeth start like falling out of your head or something. That's all correct. Yeah. People didn't get scurvy despite not understanding vitamin C because most produce has it. Many fruits and vegetables have it. Right. Fresh produce. Not just, not just citruses, not just oranges It's in a lot of things Yeah, we did a recent episode about cabbage Where we talked about cabbage having tons of vitamin C Even though it's not sweet citrus fruit That's why I crunch down on my daily head of cabbage

Keeps me healthy and fit Yeah, and I'm sick of podcast reviewers Complaining about our huge cabbage crunch noises, all right? It keeps us going. We need it for strength. It's soothing, right? Yeah, and the human body needs vitamin C to properly use carbohydrates and fats and proteins, basically to have a body. lose carbohydrates and fats and proteins, basically to have a body. And if you don't have it, it leads to exhaustion, anemia, bleeding, bruising, your limbs hurt and swell. And then from there, gum

disease and this combination of problems can cause death. Like it's a very serious disease, even though in our heads, it's kind of funny pirate stuff, maybe. Yeah. I mean, you know, funny pirate stuff can still be serious. Yeah. And it wasn't just pirates. It was also like any kind of sailor, any kind of, whenever people were in this position of not having access to fresh produce, they would have things like hardtack or even like maybe salted pork or whatever, but that just didn't have enough

of those vitamins in it. Exactly. Yeah. We particularly started seeing this problem once human ships were big enough and had large enough sails to be out on the water for a long time. Right. And not just guys like rowing a boat close to shore. Right.

So yeah, then people said, oh, this horrible, weird disease is happening to most of the crew and we don't know why. It was terrifying. Yeah. I mean, like you're bleeding out of your gums and your limbs are covered in bruises. That seems like visually pretty horrifying. And there, again, are many produces that can solve this. You can even start to have scurvy and recover pretty quickly if you get enough vitamin C.

And this is all on the lemon episode because it turns out lemons are pretty uniquely loaded with vitamin C. They're not the only high vitamin C food, but depending on the size of the adult, one lemon's juice provides between 50 and 70% of our daily need. Lemons juice provides between 50 and 70 percent of our daily need. Wow. And it's almost the only nutritional value of lemons, too. But they're really full of it. They're really amazing for it.

They taste so good, though. And they taste so good. Yeah. Yeah. Keep going. I love them. They're great. So you're saying like it took them a while to figure this out. They didn't like they didn't start just like putting lemons on the ship as soon as people were getting scurvy because they didn't necessarily know why people were getting this. That's right.

And the key process of figuring that out was really inspired by the efforts of Native American people, in particular, the Haudenosaunee people in Northeastern North America, what's now a lot of New England, Canada, New York State, that area. And there's an amazing piece for JSTOR Daily by Ashley Buchanan. She talks about how Haudenosaunee people would get enough vitamin C in the winter by boiling the leaves and the bark of conifers, like evergreen trees. They would drink the liquid from boiling that. It's not loaded with vitamin C like a lemon, but it definitely is enough. And this was something they just figured out over time. They figured out a bunch of us are getting scurvy on land from not having produce in the deep, cold winter, and this works.

Right in the winters. That's really interesting. Yeah, like because it is it is really fascinating to look at diets in places where you can't like you have really cold weather or you have to go without fresh produce for a long time. Like I think this is also true of people who live in sort of Arctic climates is that they have to find ways to eat what is available to them in a way that provides them with these vitamins. I think for some people it's like eating raw meat, like raw red meat or raw fish helps provide those vitamins that you would otherwise get from produce when you can get produce. That's right. On the little while ago narwhal episode of SIF, we talked about their bodies containing some vitamin C.

Right, right. So you can hunt a narwhal for this in some places. You can either eat a lemon or hunt a narwhal, whichever you choose. And I am lazy. Lemons all the way. Let's do it i'm not gonna chase a sea unicorn kidding yeah yeah man i mean but you know when you live uh when you live miles and miles and miles away from the next available lemon that narwhal starts to

look pretty fresh and juicy the citron of the sea. Anyway. Yeah. And this cultural practice changes the world among Haudenosaunee people who figured out evergreens for winter. What happens is French invaders and traders meet these people. And in the year 1535, Jacques Cartier is leading a group where most of the guys have scurvy. And he said, this is bad. What do I do? And he notices that a few Haudenosaunee people are also suffering symptoms. But then he sees them a few days later and they're fine. And after eventually speaking to some of them, Cartier finds out about this conifer concoction from boiling leaves and bark. And then he and his guys do that and rest and recover.

And so this is news, you know? Yeah, how about that? Talking to other people and learning from them. So that happens in the 1500s. More than 200 years later, in the 1740s, there's a Scottish doctor named James Lind, who is the ship surgeon on a British Navy ship and says, can I solve scurvy? Like, why don't I work on that? That seems good. Yeah, it seems like a good project. And he heard about this Cartier story from the 1500s. He also heard about what was known by Europeans as spruce beer drank by other native

people in Newfoundland. And it's a similar idea where the spruces have some vitamin C in them and you make something consumable. And so from there, Lind says diet probably impacts scurvy because their diet seems to help. They don't have this thing right they they drink a thing it makes the thing go away therefore maybe it's things you put in your body right i feel like it is still really impressive that you know people figure i mean it's more impressive the original people who would figure out boiling the tree bark and stuff is what helps. Like that's, that's the big impressive thing. But yeah, I guess like, you know, it's, these things aren't so intuitive back then. Yeah, that's right. Like it's, it sounds easy to us

because I just got to Google this information and it's easy, but it was hard before. We all have Flintstones vitamins as kids. The concept isn't novel to us. Wow, that was my key vitamin C. Yeah. Oh, they're so tasty. They were really good. I always wanted more than one. We actually didn't have the Flintstones ones regularly.

Ours were usually shaped like little fruit, which was cute. Oh, you missed out on pop culture characters based on The Honeymooners. Every kid's favorite show. We're all obsessed with it. That's why we like the Flintstones. Right. So this insight, diet impacting scurvy, various captains had kind of variously tried stuff. But in 1747, surgeon James Lynn does an experiment where he, in a controlled and written down way, gives specific foods to sick sailors. And the guys he gave lemons get over their scurvy like immediately, like boom, solved, fixed. Wow. Lind writes this up, tells the British Navy we should try lemons for scurvy.

And the British Navy does not use this information for about 50 years. Of course not. Why would the British Navy do anything in response to current information? Yeah, it's very clownish. Then, like, finally, after lots, lots more scurvy death and so on, the British Navy says, we have this report from before. And so they start distributing lemon juice as a ration for sailors. Between 1795 and 1814, they distribute 1.6 million gallons of lemon juice to their ships. And scurvy basically vanishes. It's just not a problem anymore. This is borderline a military secret of the British. They have a better Navy in terms of crew health

than everybody else for that period. Wow. Wow. The lemon secret. Yeah. Lemons. There's such a secret of fruit. You can like feed your troops with it so they don't get scurvy and then write secret messages about like, Hey, we don't have scurvy. Don't tell anyone else. Wow. Big military episode. Yeah. Wow. Those years are important. They, that they started around 1795 from then to 1814 is pretty much the time of the Napoleonic Wars. That's Napoleon's prime for conquering a lot of Europe. And it's argued that the British Navy is able to blockade this continental French empire and maintain naval control and support the fight to eventually

defeat Napoleon because the crews aren't all dying of scurvy. That makes sense. It might be lemons prepping it up. Yeah. When you're fighting, like it makes sense that if like on one side, everyone's like gums aren't bleeding and their limbs aren't like covered in bruises and their legs aren't like snapping in half like brittle twigs. That does make them better in a sort of battle situation. I know this as as a war expert. Yeah, you've been the admiral of many navies. You know this. Many navies, navy oranges. Yeah, you've been the admiral of many navies. You know this. Many navies. Navy oranges.

Wait, naval oranges. Naval oranges. I follow it. I like it. Yeah. This is huge for the British, and it's basically a spark from a Haudenosaunee people that defeats Napoleon.

And then the very last step of the story is also very humorous because Britain basically loses track of this advantage. They forget the lemons? What they did is they said, hey, based on our colonial possessions and fruit prices, let's switch to limes. Limes is just baby lemons. Everyone knows that. Limes is lemons. Unfortunately, limes do have vitamin C, but kind of less than lemons. I didn't know this. Some scurvy returns. It's not as effective of a treatment, the same amount of juice. And then from there, some people start becoming like, I guess I'd call it anti-vax about citrus for scurvy.

Oh, interesting. They're like, did this even work? Like, were we just lucky for a while? And this is probably all nonsense. Why would we even try to have citrus for scurvy? Right. Like it worked with this fruit, but not with this fruit. And therefore we should never have any fruit. Pretty much. Yeah. Yeah. this fruit but not with this fruit and therefore we should never have any fruit pretty much yeah yeah so then scurvy kind of comes back it takes a lot longer for us to fully make it a very rare disease and also that's why the nickname limey gets applied to british sailors and british people

even though lemons were the key insight and lemons were the real force behind that scurvy defeat. Right. But limey, I thought limey was a negative connotation, right? Like, yeah, and it's yeah, it's not great. So apologies if that hit yard when I said it, folks. But yeah, I don't think it's like horrible, horrible. Oh, good heavens. But the nickname limey is from limes in the british navy from a failed post lemon strategy post lemon strategy i do love the idea that there are dedicated

anti-citrus truthers uh during this time period like doing like the equivalent of blogging which i guess would be pamphleting about like how the lemon and the big citrus is trying to put poison in your body yeah pretty much like this is silly why are we juicing and shipping fruit juice all over the world because we have an empire all over the world pointless filled with filled with microchips um or micro ch, little chaps, tiny men who go in your bloodstream and control your body. Doctor, my bloodstream is full of the words oy gov. Am I full of chaps?

Am I full of microchaps? Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, lemons are the hybrid of a sour fruit for marmalade and a hard to eat proto citrus with religious significance. Those fruits are the sour orange and the citron. Takeaway number two, Meyer lemons are at the heart of two different extremely weird scandals. Takeaway number three, thanks to Native American knowledge about evergreen trees, a Scottish doctor used lemons to cure scurvy and defeat Napoleon. Plus some amazing numbers about lemon batteries, lemon spycraft, and all sorts of

different eras of lemon use and growth. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now, if you support this show at MaximumFun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is how lemon growers accidentally invented the Sicilian Maf. Visit sifpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 14 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of MaxFun bonus shows. It's special audio. It's just for members.

Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include the book Lemon, A Global History by journalist and food writer Toby Sonneman, a lot of amazing digital material from National Geographic, from the Washington Post, from the Royal Society of Chemistry, and a particularly amazing piece for JSTOR Daily by Ashley Buchanan about Haudenosaunee people and their use of evergreens for vitamin C. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land

of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadigoke people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, as we said, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week, I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 131. That's about the

topic of barnacles. What a kind of fitting topic coming off of Scurvy. Anyway, barnacles, fun fact about them, the barnacle glue that barnacles use to attach themselves to stuff might have inspired a new medical glue for human surgeries. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra, extra special thanks go to our members, and thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week

with more secretly incredibly fascinating, So How About That? Talk to you then. maximum fun a worker-owned network of artists own shows supported directly by you