It's citrus season in the U.S., and if you live along the citrus belt — the string of states that hug the southern border from California to Florida — a bevy of fresh local oranges, lemons, kumquats and so much more are showing up in your farmstands. For everyone else, these fruits make a longer journey to enliven the dwindling selection of storage apples and pears in produce aisles, bringing some welcome variety to our diets. If you're lucky enough to have a relative in a citrus-growing state, you likely have received shipments of fresh fruit as a gift; if not, order your own! Companies that specialize in mail order abound; but since some conventional citrus is a pesticide-heavy, especially tangerines and grapefruits, check out growers that specialize in certified organic, like Frog Hollow Farm.
According to Tracy Kahn, curator of the Givaudan Citrus Variety Collection at the University of California, Riverside, which has 1,000 different cultivars or citrus and related species, relatives of the citrus varieties we know today likely originated in Yunnan Province in China elsewhere in Southeast Asia in the Miocene period. They made their way to the Mediterranean, Australia and beyond and are now grown mostly between 35 north latitude and 35 south latitude, "in areas that are a little bit tropical but basically all over the world," Kahn says.
