Episode 52: Forbidden Fruit + Stabby Spoons- Grapefruit
Hello and welcome to another week of Rooted! This week we’re digging in to a refreshing citrus - Grapefruit.
Most of us know grapefruit as the ruby red, sour, bitter fruit you sprinkle with sugar and use fancy spoons to eat in the morning. But what you might not realize is just how confusing and muddy their entire history is!
Grapefruits are broadleaf evergreen trees with roots reaching back to barbados. The trees can get up to 30 feet tall, with about the same spread. They have fragrant white blossoms and large yellow-ish orange fruit. This fruit takes a while to mature, which is why most of our citrus doesn’t bloom until mid to late winter.
Like any other citrus, grapefruit prefers direct sunlight and well draining soil. However, unlike most citrus, grapefruit didn’t originate in asia…or at least, we don’t have any record of it there.
This is strange, as while citrus is know n for hybridizing (grapefruit itself is actually a hybrid) almost all citrus was originally found in asia, and we honestly have no idea how the heck th first grapefruit ever recorded was in barbados of all places, or even why we call it grapefruit.
To understand how we got here, let’s take a step back to talk about citrus.
At this point, scientists are pretty confident that citrus stems from the common ancestor Citrus linczangensis, which was native to south asia. When the monsoons started to lighten up, citus liczangenisis wasted know time spreading far and wide. As it spread, it managed to morph into about 10 new kinds of citrus, which further mixed and mingled to bring us the INSANE variety of citrus we have today. These 10 fruits are Pomelo, Mandarin oranges, Kumquats, Round limes, Finger limes (the creepy hand-like looking fruits with lots of pith), micranthas (C. micrantha), the Ichang papeda (C. cavaleriei), and the mangshanyegan.
Once we had those 10 varietes, things started to get even more wild. Now we have countless varieties of citrus, but it can be really tricky to pin down who comes from where. FOr example, there are TONS of citrus that look really similar, but may have COMPLETELY different lineage, while there may also be some citrus that looks completely different, but is essentially the same fruit with only a slight difference in the bloom, which impacts the shape of the fruit. Because Citrus is such an important crop through history, it should come as no surprise that sometimes the only difference in a patented fruit is it’s resistance to a specific pest or disease.
As a side note, I know we’ve talked about it before, but I still find the entire legal/business process of patenting nature to be mind boggling and counter-intuitive. While I don’t want to super deep dive into all that as a lady without a law degree, I can tell you that the first patented grapefruit remains to be by far the most popular variety- the Ruby Red grapefruit, which was patented in 1929!
Grapefruits themselves are a hybrid of pomelos and sweet mandarin oranges. Over the years, they have gradually gotten more sweet, more juicy, and significantly more disease resistant than early varieties.
Outside of how the heck they got to barbados, we still have no idea why Grapefruit is called grapefruit. While some have hypothesized that the name stems from the fact that the grow in groups, others think that maybe it’s because they taste a lot like unripe grapes, but no one is honestly super sure why we ACTUALLY call them grapefruits.
One thing NOT up for debate is how insanely popular grapefruit was,... at one time it was so popular that it almost single handedly built the south florida rail road..
See, in the early days of american citrus groves, folkx were originally settingng up shop in georgia, but one season an unexpected cold snap absolutely WRECKED crops, resulting in massive losses for citrus farmers. Deciding the risks in georgia just weren’t worth the reward, they packed up and headed for the warm, swampy, miso like promised land- florida.
Florida was great for citrus growers because of it’s warm, humid climate. But, it was still fairly unsettled and honestly pretty brutal pre-dinsification of the state. With so few people wanted to live or travel there, they quickly realized they would need some help getting all these grapefruits out to the rest of the world…so, they started building a rail road to specifically get citrus wherever it needed to go!
From there, industry started popping up all over florida, includining many of the tourist destinations we know and love today…so in a round about way, this so called “forbidden fruit” really is to thank for all of the wild and wondrous stories we hear from florida.
Just like any other citrus, grapefruit is an amazing source of vitamin c, with 1 serving containing 100% of your daily needs! It;s also a great anti inflammatory, and can help give your immune system an extra boost.
However, unlike most other citrus, grapefruit has a bit of a storied past, and almost cult-like following in fad diet culture.
To start with the storied past, there was a time in history where grapefruit was thought to be the “forbidden fruit” mentioned in the bible…or at least, that’s what one kooky reverend in the 1750’s thought as he and his followers went on a quest around the world to find the fruit and banish it from history…I can’t really find how he decided it was the forbidden fruit, or how we was convinced otherwise, but eventually he DID get with the program and decided to end his crusade on it, making way for the cult following of 1930’s dieters.
If you know anything about fad diets, you know they are 100% unhinged, and 100% harmful; to those who try them. The grapefruit diet is certainly no exception here.
The diet has changed with each iteration since it’s inception in the 1930s, but the main tenets are: high protein, low sugar, low carb, low fat, and VERY low calorie. And of course, lots of grapefruit! It was suggested you eat a grapefruit with every meal. With the claim being that grapefruit contained some kind of miracle enzyme that would burn fat while you just went about your business as usual.
Obviously this diet doesn’t work, and has been super damaging to anyone who attempted this long term. However, this diet also had a TON of unforeseen complications due to grapefruit’s many strange interactions with medications.
Grapefruit can actually increase the absorption of many medications. While that may seem like a good thing on the surface, it can actually be super dangerous. Most of us only absorb up to like 4% of the medications we take, which is why dosages are so much higher than what you actually need. However, grapefruit can more than DOUBLE how much you absorb, making your normally super safe does into an overwhelming nightmare for you body.
Weirdly enough, grapefruit can also DECREASE your absorption of other medications, as it contains an enzyme that binds the CYP3A4, enzymes in your digestive tract, making it less easy to uptake the medication, and in some cases even allowing the drug to more easily penetrate into your blood stream, making it extremely dangerous,
From a culinary perspective, grapefruit is much less dangerous, but can often be used as a savory or sweet addition to drinks, food, candy, and beyond.
While there are a TON of things you can make with grapefruit, what really interests me is the special and hyper-specific cutlery used ONLY for grapefruit.
From what I could find, it’s presumed that grapefruit spoons became popular in the victorian era, when everyone was obsessing over how to prove they were the fanciest and in-the-know. So, in order to prove they were posh, people lost their SHIT over spoons with a triangle shape and a more serrated edge. This helped them to scoop the fruit away from the pith, and made for a slightly higher stakes eating experience…one thing about victorians, they LOVED to live on the edge while shaming anyone they desperately tried to prove inferior.
But they didn’t stop at grapefruit SPOONS, they also had a special grapefruit knife. It’s a curved knife with a serrated edge designed to easily cut a grapefruit, as the curve helps those tiny teeth cut through the thick peel with less resistance.
And not just ANYONE can buy a grapefruit knife. In england, after some contentious arguments, it was decided that a grapefruit knife is INDEED a knife, and that you need to be at least 18 to buy one- a rule that still stands true today…so this year, get the 18 year olds the thing they REALLY want, the status symbol they can lord over their peers, a weirdly shaped and overall less efficient knife.
As far as citrus goes, grapefruit is by far the most mysterious and contradicting fruit. Next time you see one, I hope you take a moment to consider what a wild life it’s lived as a status symbol, medical mind boggler, and absolute foodie fad.
Speaking of foodie fads, If you like the herbalism and culinary elements of this show, I think you’ll really like our new project! It’s called mocktails and mixtapes, where each week I take you through a new mocktail of my own imagining, and pair it with the music that inspired it! The drinks will typically leverage something we’ve talked about on the show, so it’s a great way to take your planty appreciation one step further!
We’re kicking things off with a floral twist on a grapefruit focused favorite- the paloma! You can catch that over on Mixtapes_Mocktails on Instagram!
If I don’t see you over there, I’ll catch you next week with another set of tall tales and true histories for us to dig into. See you then!
Sources:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/grapefruit-history-and-drug-interactions
https://www.webmd.com/diet/a-z/grapefruit-diet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapefruit
https://eatingtools.com/blogs/blog/blog-the-surprising-history-of-spoons-n11
