So I'm munching on a delicious clementine that I bought from Trader Joe's yesterday ( I love TJ) and all I can think of is that advertisement that Angela was describing with the kids from Spain sharing their sunshine.
Cut into that Patrick Chiu's very funny comment about how it'd be more appropriate for them to show pirates with scurvy and
I'm eating my clementine with a very big smile.
5 comments:
Arrrgh...scurvy!!!
Sweeeeet Clementine....Oh Clementine.... (isn't that a barbershop quartet song?)
Why are mandarins so hot all of a sudden? Credit the Clementine. In the 1990s, growers from Spain, the largest exporters of fresh citrus in the world, started flooding the American market with them. From 1996 to 2000, Spain's shipments of Clementines to the United States increased five-fold, to more than 200 million pounds per year.
That got the attention of California's citrus growers, many of whom were getting squeezed economically in the souring orange market.
"I think there were two things growers were looking at," says Thacher. "First, that's a lot of tangerines. If we can take some of that, we should be able to grow them cheaper and have an advantage.
"The other thing is that in Europe, mandarin consumption is much higher than it is here. In the U.S., it's always been 2% to 3% of the market. In Europe, it's about one-third, about the same as oranges and lemons. So that says there might be room to grow in this country."
Thacher grows a dozen varieties of mandarins at Friend's Ranches, the three orchards in Ojai named for his wife's family. His father-in-law, Elmer Friend, was one of the first farmers in the area to grow mandarins, planting Dancys in the 1960s, mainly to sell to Chinese markets in San Francisco.
Friend planted more mandarins in the 1980s, as the California Valencia orange harvest moved from Southern California to cheaper ground in the Central Valley.
Today, Friend's Ranches farms about 75 acres of mandarins, divided among a dozen varieties, including familiar favorites such as Dancy, Satsuma and Clementine, lesser-known gems such as Lee and Page, and cutting-edge releases such as Tahoe Gold, Shasta Gold and Yosemite Gold newly released by breeders at UC Riverside.
Woo hoo go go UCR!!
Actually that clementine is really sad =)
Those UCR scientists are PLAYING GOD!!!!
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