Heavenly Honeybells.
DOWN YONDER, FL. – It seemed incongruous on the surface, a plump orange bobbing peacefully on a clam Gulf of Mexico perhaps a few hundred yards off the beach.
But there it was. How it got there is anyone’s guess.
When people think of Florida they usually thing of two things: the beach and oranges. One rarely thinks of the two together, however. They are two sides of a Florida coin.
Both are big money-makers for Floridians; one passively, the other actively. They are such big money-makers that people just can’t resist the temptation to tinker with them in the hopes of finding a better version.
Some folks just aren’t happy until they see a bigger, whiter beach than the one they have.
Oranges, on the other hand, have seen so much experimentation over the last 60 years that today there are as many different kinds of orange, grapefruit, tangerines and tangelos as Carter has little liver pills.
To some degree, the citrus growers of Florida are responsible for the silly rules they must now live by if they want to sell their oranges to the major squeezers and marketers.
Back in the early 1960s, the growers were afraid that proliferation of the new orange varieties would lead to the adulteration of Florida’s pure frozen orange juice market. They persuaded the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to impose a rule that prohibited the marketing of any so-called “orange juice” unless at least 90 percent of it was actually the juice of an orange – no tangelo juice, no grapefruit mix, nothing. It had to be real juice from a real Valencia or some other genetically correct orange.
Most of the experimentation has been good. It has produced, for example, the fabled Honeybell or Mineola tangelo, an incomparably sweet cross between an orange and a grapefruit.
Its juice, when fresh-squeezed each morning, is the nectar of gods. It is usually big, very plump and very welcomed.
But it has its drawbacks. It has to be squeezed each morning and not allowed to stand overnight because its two strains of juice will separate. It’s not the kind of orange wanted by major commercial juice corporations because it’s also prone to disease, which makes it undependable for an annual harvest and undependable for a juice crop.
That sorta makes Honeybells our own Florida secret, just for us (and for friends to whom some of you feel kind enough toward to send a bushel or two Up North).
Those of you who don’t know the supreme ecstasy of pouring a glass of Honeybell juice down your throat on a clear, crisp Florida mornin’ just have to understand that until you do you haven’t enjoyed a full, rewarding life.
If you’re Honeybell-impaired, I feel sorry for you. Maybe we’ll have to set up special parking spaces for you at the produce market.
The rest of us will just enjoy them while we can.
As the orange tree is grafted so it will grow.
Like Charles Ernest Cobb used to say about the citrus industry he so dearly loved, ‘if at first you don’t suck a see, keep on suckin’ ‘til you do suck a seed.”
