About the book
A planned short magazine piece on oranges and their juice turned into a full book when John McPhee kept finding more material than an article could hold. He covers the botany, history and industry of the fruit through sketches of growers, pickers, packers and botanists, the first orange barons, early settlers along Florida's Indian River and modern makers of concentrate. A profile of Ben Hill Griffin, of Frostproof in Florida, presents him as possibly the last of the individual orange barons. The book's material ranges from the orangeries kept by European monarchs to a Caribbean custom of cleaning floors with split oranges, one half in each hand.
Food styling and photography blogger Catalina Penciu praised it as a beautiful account of how oranges are grown, cared for and turned into juice, and said the piece McPhee wrote for The New Yorker still feels alive.
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Catalina Penciu (Food Styling and Photography Blogger)
McPhee also wrote a beautiful book called Oranges, about the citrus groves in California; how oranges are grown, taken care of, transformed into the famous juice we all know and love. It's a piece written for the New Yorker in the 60s, but it's still as much alive today.
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