Episode Transcript
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0:01
Hello! It's Dylan. And.
0:03
Today. His. Birthday
0:05
happier if they everybody. And actually
0:07
Friday is Arbor Day! And.
0:09
So we figured. What? Better
0:12
thing to do. Than. Spend
0:14
this week. Celebrating.
0:16
The world's incredible and wonderous trees.
0:18
We love trees here about Obscura
0:20
and we're going to bring you
0:22
a bunch of stories about them.
0:24
Were gonna have stories about a
0:27
disgruntled plant, explore about a strange
0:29
Australian phenomenon involving people emailing trees,
0:31
and we've begun to branch out
0:33
a little bit. Wanna. Talk
0:36
about. Killer. Trees The
0:38
dark side of trees with
0:40
none other than writer Mary
0:43
Roach. There's a lot to look forward
0:45
to during this week. Here's. Today's episode.
0:54
The most important part of say a thing as smelling
0:56
cel before you eat are you putting thing in your
0:58
mouth he wouldn't be how close each such as has
1:00
the it's your know the for you can snipe. This.
1:02
Is maybe make which. Mandy is a
1:05
professional taster and she's the author of
1:07
the book How to Taste. I've
1:09
ever. I never throw my citrus before I eat
1:11
it. You gotta throw everything birth
1:14
and fell import level and like the anti lead.
1:16
Glad that you're ever having coffee that to take
1:18
the lead off Stevens night before he has said
1:20
so important. Recently,
1:24
Mandy and I met up on
1:26
a Zoom call to do a
1:28
little bit of a joint taste
1:30
test. We had lemons and Clementine
1:32
set out in front of us
1:34
and a mission to taste them
1:36
carefully. Yeah, what should we eat
1:38
first? I do it, Clementine. Maybe
1:40
a little more subtle. Thunder? I'm going to go
1:43
for that one breath. You can feel like the
1:45
thinner thinner peel going on is less protection of
1:47
the acid inside. The I. Always
1:53
delicious. Definitely. Get
1:55
a little or that fucker in the back to you have
1:57
that at all. that a little tired but nothing. Yeah,
2:00
yeah, Bourke wrote nice I could see his
2:02
by the like. Millions are
2:04
you tonight? So many of them are
2:06
right now. Let's let's do the lemon.
2:08
Let's London son Yeah this is family
2:11
lives in he can how the thick
2:13
thick peel going on I didn't know
2:15
about with the name of I just
2:17
think of it as like the standard
2:19
lemon yeah addresses for one another going
2:21
to be in a are either one
2:23
man or a list and lemon pretty
2:25
much as I know. It's not. now.
2:27
I like my breasts. Yeah, yes, I thought of
2:29
going to be like, you know when you get
2:31
that really far. slight yup on the painful
2:34
tucker but it's really it's pretty printed
2:36
book. As you can tell, We're
2:39
going to be talking about citrus and we're
2:41
going to be talking about. One.
2:43
Particular citrus that using a weird way
2:45
kind of a combination of these two.
2:48
Yeah. We're we're talking about a fruit today that
2:50
kind of falls right between these two fruits. And
2:52
ah, it's the Meyer Lemon, which is a little
2:54
bit hard to find when it's off season. And
2:57
grocery stores. As we discovered. That
3:00
were written in assessing. I guess you could try to play a
3:02
little. Bit of each fruit into our mountain
3:04
the meantime and C S. C for
3:06
creating that Meyer Lemon extent I think of
3:08
the. Like two thirds lead in one
3:11
third man for and suggest that the
3:13
axle tastes are trying to recreate that
3:15
if ominous that are Clementine flies on
3:17
my lemon and and like by the
3:19
whole thing those our this may or
3:21
may not or. A
3:25
pretty good actually don't actually know that balancing
3:27
that that means or are they had some
3:29
things in a balance and some of the
3:31
partners that. That's a
3:34
pretty good approximation of be a little
3:36
that's not would go on the island.
3:38
I gotta get my hands of the
3:40
fire. At. I.
3:49
Have drawn threats and this is Alice.
3:51
obscure up a celebration of the world
3:53
strange, incredible and wonder if places me
3:55
undies. Not just professional taste or but
3:58
also an expert on the history. of
4:00
the Meyer lemon. Mandy wrote this incredible
4:03
story for Alison Skira about the Meyer
4:05
lemon. So we are gonna do a
4:07
deep dive into the lemon,
4:09
the eccentric plant explorer
4:12
discovered it and accidentally
4:14
released this seemingly unstoppable
4:16
virus causing this very
4:18
real mid-century citrus panic.
4:21
That is all after this.
4:25
I'm gonna put my lemons and I'm gonna put these on the
4:27
floor. I don't know if I'm
4:30
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Yours. Maybe
5:46
we should talk about the reputation of
5:48
the Meyer lemon. It sort of
5:50
has this aura of like
5:52
specialness about it. You see it very clearly called
5:54
out on menus. Like if you're using a Meyer
5:57
lemon, no one ever just says lemon. They're like,
5:59
oh, it's this. We're going Meyer lemons.
6:01
Why does it have that kind of like? Specialness
6:04
to it two things make it really
6:06
special one is a very very thin keel So you
6:08
as a grocery store lemon you might see that big
6:11
white kiss around the citrus separating it
6:13
from the rind kind of the zest
6:15
Of the lemon. Yeah, my lemon doesn't really
6:17
have that separation So you don't have all that bitterness in there
6:19
You have that really fresh beautiful zest
6:21
that has this special kind of
6:24
rose floral notes that typical
6:26
grocery store lemons don't have and then You get right
6:28
into the flesh of the lemon. So if you really
6:30
wanted to you could just bite into a Meyer lemon
6:34
Right through the peel and especially if it's not waxed
6:37
You've done are you just like walking around eating
6:39
Meyer lemons like apples? I
6:42
have done it. Yes And
6:44
it's great. Yeah, that's why you can do it on a
6:46
tart too If you want to like them preserve it You
6:48
just don't have all that bitterness of the piss and then
6:50
the flesh is also just a little bit sweeter a little
6:52
bit less Less
6:55
tart listener You may have noted
6:57
that we were not taste testing
6:59
a Meyer lemon because despite our
7:01
producer Amanda's Most rigorous
7:03
efforts to find and source Meyer
7:05
lemons near us on the East
7:08
Coast It was effectively
7:10
impossible. Why are they so hard to
7:12
find? So during very narrow
7:14
seasons, you can sometimes find them here in
7:16
New York But because of that really thin
7:19
keel, they're very easy to damage and bruise And
7:21
yeah, they'll get those big ugly bruises and we
7:23
know there's one thing we know about grocery stores
7:25
It's that they're not gonna be selling a bruised
7:27
fruit. So it's not always worth it for them
7:29
to bring them out here and They
7:33
can be a lot more expensive to But
7:37
there's something else unusual about the Meyer
7:39
lemon unlike the other fruits and vegetables
7:41
in the grocery store It's
7:43
named after a guy Frank Meyer.
7:46
I Went to a
7:48
period where I was like pretty obsessed with Frank
7:50
Meyer. He's like this
7:52
classic adventurer type He's always wearing
7:54
this gigantic fur hat big boots
7:57
and in the early 1900s Frank worked
8:00
for the US Department of Agriculture, the
8:02
USDA. And he
8:04
had a very unusual gig there.
8:07
I mean, Frank Meyer, I think, has the coolest job
8:09
title. I've come across in research in a
8:11
long time, which they just called him plants
8:13
explorer, Frank Meyer. But
8:15
basically, he was sent out to
8:18
bring new fruits, vegetables, citrus plants
8:20
from Asia to America. He would go on
8:23
these long trips where he'd be collecting samples,
8:25
collecting seeds. He'd cataloged, I think it was
8:27
over 2,500 different new species that
8:29
we weren't aware of in the US, brought
8:32
back things like different kinds of pears,
8:34
all different kinds of citrus. He traveled
8:36
the world cataloging plants, sending back his
8:38
notebooks are amazing to read.
8:41
Frank was, of course, not really discovering
8:43
these plants. They were very
8:46
well known all over Asia. But
8:48
what he was doing was finding them and
8:50
introducing them to the United States. And
8:52
the lemon that would later be named after him,
8:55
that he first came across in the summer of
8:57
1908. It
8:59
was just outside of Beijing. He
9:02
said that it was an incredible lemon, that it was
9:04
sweeter, it was something better. It was in a lot
9:06
of homes there in China. And
9:08
those were the letters that he wrote back to
9:10
the USDA before he was able to send seeds
9:12
and samples. So definitely knew that
9:14
it was something special, but he was discovering a lot
9:16
of special things at the time. So I don't know
9:19
that he knew how long its legacy would be. He
9:21
also seemed like this, just like personally,
9:24
like this kind of complex,
9:27
romantic, sometimes kind of dark character.
9:30
A lot of his notebooks are
9:32
public knowledge. They're all published on
9:35
the USDA website. And
9:37
you can really track his moods through
9:39
these letters. He's talking about things like
9:41
pears and berries and things
9:43
like that. But he's also talking about his
9:46
loneliness or that he thinks the locals
9:48
in certain towns don't like him and other towns they
9:50
do. Some people are very helpful to
9:52
him, helping him collect things, helping him ship things.
9:54
Other people are kind of trying to push him
9:56
out of their area. Some People are
9:58
fascinated by him. Some people are... a little
10:01
afraid of men and he he takes all
10:03
of that feedback emotionally. Very Ah, Sperry
10:05
personally and definitely race without them.
10:07
The same way he writes that his emotions and
10:10
toward the end of. His travels you can
10:12
start to see yeah some and loneliness
10:14
i'm i'm not were diagnosed anyone but
10:16
like to them depressive. Thoughts crawling in
10:18
us about what what his works doing?
10:21
Does anyone care what he's doing? Things
10:23
like that. He kind
10:25
of his writing. Letters from at the time
10:27
that he's feeling that sentence and sign
10:29
on his feeling unwell com he's going
10:31
to these small towns. I'm the what
10:33
we see it in the know. it's
10:35
our job you things leading up to
10:37
him being very lonely not. Not feeling
10:40
like he has this is filling
10:42
on life projects in. Any more.
10:45
To give you an idea of his
10:47
mindset owner reduce the person of one
10:50
letter that he sent his boss view
10:52
as be a it's dated May Eighteen
10:54
Nineteen eighteen anyone. Since passing through these
10:56
villages that have burned down how they
10:58
were having difficulty getting food. And
11:01
then he writes the somewhat
11:03
mysterious kind of was nihilistic
11:06
passage he writes. It
11:09
often seems that we do not leave ourselves
11:11
any longer, but that we are being whipped.
11:13
Uncontrollable forces seem to be
11:15
at work among humanity and final
11:18
results or possibly purposes or not
11:20
being revealed as yeah. That.
11:23
Is for so far as I can look
11:25
into this whole i can a cataclysm. In.
11:28
Fact out that are turns out to be his last.
11:31
There's reports of him falling off the
11:34
boat a Sicilian. the Us sale at
11:36
the government reports are that's it, was
11:38
like a boating accident and then yeah,
11:41
he kind of washes up somewhere along
11:43
the river. It's very mysterious. Sad
11:46
kind of lose any other that
11:48
yeah he. Something. Happened.
11:51
No one really knows exactly what. Knew.
11:59
Him said. dies in 1918.
12:02
But the lemon lives on. And then by
12:04
the 1930s, it seems like it's sort of
12:06
starting to really spread, you
12:08
know, especially across California. Is that is that
12:10
kind of the right timeline of this? Yeah,
12:13
if you look up the like newspaper ads and
12:15
things like that, it's pretty fun. There's giveaways
12:17
of like get a free Meyer lemon tree
12:20
when you buy something in the spring. California
12:22
starts planting Meyer lemon trees on
12:25
their medians and in between
12:27
like a lot and things like that because they're
12:29
beautiful, they grow pretty well. Yeah, they're trying to
12:31
make it this California citrus thing. So it's really,
12:33
it's fun to look through some of those old
12:35
newspapers and just see lemon recipes,
12:37
free lemon trees, how to take care
12:39
of your lemon trees is a lot
12:41
of columns like that. And then yeah,
12:43
California actively planting their own
12:45
Meyer lemon trees in public spaces. But
12:49
there is a real problem about that
12:51
there is a kind of ticking time
12:53
bomb inside of these plants. So what
12:56
is this what is this citrus plant
12:58
hiding? It's a non symptomatic
13:00
carrier of quick decline citrus disease,
13:02
I can act in days
13:04
and just absolutely decimates other
13:06
citrus plants. So there
13:09
was huge blight happening in California
13:11
citrus and they couldn't figure out
13:13
what was going wrong, you know, just
13:15
orange groves just absolutely declining to quick
13:17
decline disease and days, weeks. Where
13:20
is this disease coming from? And
13:22
it's in every Californian's backyard or
13:24
living room in these non symptomatic
13:27
Meyer lemon trees, right? They end
13:29
up being the like perfect stealth
13:32
agent of death because they look
13:34
healthy and well and they're being
13:36
planted all over the place.
13:39
But then their disease is carried
13:42
it's like spread by by aphids
13:44
or something. Yeah, the bugs that carry it
13:47
and Asian citrus in
13:49
China had built up resistance to
13:51
it and it was fine. But yeah,
13:53
when it got into our American citrus,
13:55
especially oranges was the big issue. The
13:58
aphids would get on the plant. plants and just
14:00
immediately they'd be declining and within
14:03
days trees would be dead. How
14:05
big a deal was this? How
14:07
worried were people? It was a big
14:10
enough deal that it was the first ever international
14:12
gathering of citrus scientists and experts
14:14
to try to fight this. It
14:16
was the reason the International Organization
14:18
of Citrus Biologists was created
14:20
that still exists trying
14:23
to come up with a multi-prong plan
14:25
both of how to
14:27
save American citrus but also
14:29
protect other countries because the Meyer lemon was
14:31
making its way down to South America. There
14:33
was reports in Africa of the same things
14:36
happening. So they wanted to get an international
14:38
group together to figure out how far this
14:40
had gone and how they could prevent it.
14:42
It got quite intense. Like the
14:44
US government got involved. It's
14:46
like they start these big programs. What were some of
14:48
the things they were doing to try and get
14:52
rid of this Meyer lemon that they had now
14:54
spread all over the place? They were literally sending
14:56
people to knock on doors and if
14:59
they saw Meyer lemon trees and they were coming back next week and
15:01
if that tree is still here, we're going to forcibly take
15:04
it and things like that. On
15:09
one hand the scientists were working like crazy to
15:11
try to breed this gene out of
15:13
Meyer lemons and then
15:15
on the ground they were enlisting police
15:18
forces, people from city hall, tell on
15:21
your neighbors if you see Meyer lemon tree. They
15:23
were obviously digging up all those public Meyer
15:25
lemon trees and really
15:27
going out of their way to get them out
15:30
of their counties. And
15:32
of course when anything like that happens and
15:35
someone's knocking at your door trying to take
15:37
your lemon tree, all of a sudden there's
15:39
another faction that rises up that's like my
15:41
rights, my lemon tree, my backyard kind of
15:43
thing. So some of the little city hall
15:45
debates that were published in newspapers are just
15:48
insane in the way that people
15:50
wanted to send their rights to
15:52
poison local trees I
15:54
guess. of
16:00
California Riverside came up with an
16:03
answer, an alternative. They bred a new
16:05
Meyer lemon tree called the improved Meyer
16:07
lemon. Like if you're looking
16:10
to buy a citrus tree online, you'll
16:12
notice that they're all called improved Meyer
16:14
lemon. You can't purchase the original genetics
16:16
of Meyer lemon anywhere in the U.S.
16:25
I'm curious about you. How did you get
16:28
interested in the story of the Meyer lemon?
16:30
Why did you want to know more about
16:32
it? Yeah, so I
16:35
traveled through the many layers of
16:37
the Cicerone certification program, which is
16:39
basically sommelier, but for beer. And to
16:42
get to Master Cicerone, you have to be able
16:44
to identify 32 different
16:46
compounds just by scent and taste. So
16:48
they're different off flavors in beer. So
16:50
you have to go through really a
16:53
whole certification process to learn these flavors,
16:55
be able to blind identify them. I was
16:57
a longtime Meyer lemon lover, and I was hoping when I
17:00
was doing research for my book, How
17:02
to Taste, there was like some chemical
17:04
compound in the Meyer lemon that was
17:06
what made it so different from a
17:08
standard lemon. So I was looking through
17:10
all the scientific papers and all you
17:12
can find is like scientific papers about
17:14
how to eradicate Meyer lemons, how they're
17:17
full of disease, how to get them out of
17:19
the country. So I never found
17:21
the compound, it just seems to be a different
17:23
balance of compounds. So
17:25
there is no quick, easy chemical
17:28
shortcut to get that perfect,
17:30
not too tart, slightly floral, complex
17:32
Meyer lemon taste. But luckily,
17:34
if you can't find them at the grocery store
17:36
near you, Mandy says you can definitely try growing
17:39
them on your own. That is how they got
17:41
popular initially. They're pretty resilient. They're much better than
17:43
something like a lime tree or a lot of
17:45
people try to grow yuzu as well at home.
17:48
Riverside actually has a list that they recommend
17:51
of places that are not going to sell
17:53
you an almost dead tree. Because
17:56
that's the big problem is not that they'll give you, you
17:58
know, any citrus to the such as that they're
18:00
not well taken care of before they end up in your home
18:02
and you'll never get a lemon from them. Mandy
18:06
Naglitz is the author of How to Taste,
18:09
a Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life.
18:12
She is also a certified taster
18:14
and award-winning home brewer. Thanks, Mandy.
18:16
As a terrible home brewer, I'm
18:18
very impressed. I've done it three
18:20
times. It was fine, but no
18:22
one's writing to anybody about the
18:24
things that I've heard. Thank
18:27
you for having me. It's always fun to talk about Frank
18:29
and his many adventures. Our
18:46
podcast is a co-production of Atlas
18:48
Obscura and Stitcher Studios. This
18:50
episode was produced by Amanda
18:53
McGowan, Julia Russo. The production
18:55
team includes Doug Baldinger, Chris
18:58
Naka, Camille Stanley, Manolo Morales,
19:00
Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Johanna Mayer.
19:02
Our technical director is Casey
19:05
Holford. This episode was
19:07
mixed by Luce Fleming. If
19:09
you want to learn more, be sure
19:11
to visit atlasobscura.com. There's a link in
19:14
our episode description. And our
19:16
theme in end credit music is by Sam Sindel.
19:18
I'm Dylan Thurris. Wishing you all the
19:21
wonder in the world. I will see
19:23
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