A Personal History of the Orange with Katie Goh

Photo by Alice Meikle

On this month's Lecker Book Club, a regular interview series with authors writing in or adjacent to food culture, Katie Goh's Foreign Fruit.

Foreign Fruit is a memoir which explores Katie’s experience growing up and existing as a mixed heritage person in the north of Ireland, but also documents alongside this personal narrative a history of the orange; how the fruit moved from East to West, gaining and shedding symbolic meaning along the way.

You can find the previous Lecker episode about citrus, Oranges and Lemons, linked here.

Lecker is now part of Heritage Radio Network! Find out more about this independent podcast network dedicated to food, beverages and the culinary world and discover their many fantastic shows at heritageradionetwork.org.

You can find a transcript for this episode at leckerpodcast.com.

Foreign Fruit is out now. Find all of the Lecker Book Club reads on my Bookshop.org list. [aff link]

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Music is by Blue Dot Sessions.

You can find this episode’s transcript below the embed. Please note that this transcript is auto-generated by Descript and may contain unintended errors.

[00:00:10] This is Lecker. I'm Lucy Dearlove. First of all, I have some exciting news to share. I'll get into a little bit more detail about this at the end. But as you might have guessed by that little sonic ID you heard at the beginning of this app, and if you happen to see my Instagram post about this last week, Lecker is now part of Heritage Radio Network, a US-based independent podcast network of global shows dedicated to food and drink.

[00:00:38] Food culture and the culinary world. Thanks HRN for having me. It's very exciting. Let's get into it. 

[00:00:47] This month's Book Club Pick: Foreign Fruit by Katie Goh. Longtime listeners of Lecker will know that citrus has always been fascinating to me. I made an episode called Oranges and Lemons back in 2022, featuring the chef

[00:01:04] Selin Kiazim and the poet Nina Mingya Powles, which was an exploration of my own love of citrus and a small glimpse into the history of Britain's relationship with the fruits. I'll link that episode in the show notes and on Instagram if you're interested in listening, and you haven't already. Little did I know in the making of it, I barely scratched the surface of that story until I read Foreign Fruit. 

[00:01:28] Foreign Fruit is a memoir which considers Katie's experience growing up and existing as a mixed heritage person in the north of Ireland, but also documents, alongside this personal narrative, the history of the orange, how the fruit moved from east to west, gaining and shedding symbolic meaning along the way.

[00:01:48] The book involved the exploration and development of a whole new kind of personal writing for Katie. Disillusioned with the type of think pieces mainstream journalism often expects or even demands from people of global majority or oppressed gender backgrounds. She took time and space to reimagine what it could mean for her to write about herself as a queer woman of mixed heritage, and for reasons that we'll get into.

[00:02:11] The orange felt inseparable from that. Katie is based in Glasgow and we spoke via our respective laptops last month. During the call, I couldn't help but notice a delightful detail. Behind her on the wall was a big mirror, and every so often, depending on how she moved around, I could see the reflection of a framed illustration of an orange appearing behind her.

[00:02:32] Katie: Yeah, my friend gave that to me, um, as a little present. So it's my big orange. I really try not to like have too much orange stuff around now because it like, I'm just like, I don't wanna think about it. But I do love that like print. I think it's just so fun. 

[00:02:46] Lucy: Foreign fruit is extraordinarily broad ranging and we get into lots of fascinating things relating to it, but I couldn't possibly do it justice within one episode.

[00:02:55] So I highly recommend getting a copy of the book and reading it yourself. But to begin, here's a little bit more about it. From Katie,

[00:03:11] Katie: we're calling it a hybrid memoir because there's like lots of different strands of the book. So I'm gonna describe the different strands and maybe how they like interweave of each other. So the book is sort we of following the history of the orange, the fruit, the orange and the orange. We think. It began life in sort of like western China, Northern India, like Tibetan Plateau that kind of area thousands of years ago.

[00:03:32] And it's very hard to sort of get like that location pinned on perfectly, but that's where we think it started. So the book begins like with the orange over there and it moves down into China and then like across the silk roads over to Europe. Over to like America, like the new world, and just like how the orange has become like this global fruit in the last century.

[00:03:52] So we're following that journey that's geographical and chronological and at the same time. I was sort of also tracing my family history a little bit. So my dad's side of the family are originally from China and then they went over to Malaysia. My grandmother, my Emma, moved to Malaysia. And my grandfather, my icon was born in Malaysia.

[00:04:12] And then my dad moved over to Europe to Ireland, which is where I was born. I'm of mixed heritage. My mom's white Irish, my dad's Chinese, Malaysian. So in some ways it kind of parallels that journey from like east to west like the orange does, and. I sort of used the orange in the book to talk about like my own family's migration history, but then also as the orange moves through the world, it kind of like changed in its different meanings and it became this really interesting fruit that like was really beloved by like Judaism, Islam, like Christianity.

[00:04:44] It kind of became this like symbol almost, and I look at like the orange beginning life as this sort of wild fruit, this wild thing of nature and kind of being cultivated over years and years and years to become. Maybe something that we don't even recognize as like a fruit or even a piece of nature. It kind of takes on this like new meaning as like a symbol of foreignness and luxury in Europe, like people like kings and emperors in especially northern Europe where they can grow oranges.

[00:05:12] Sort of thought of the oranges as like symbol of like, you know, exoticism and like they were like, oh, we really want oranges because they can't grow here. Then it kind of. Yeah, moved over to become this sort of like tool for empire and, um, moved over to America. And in a lot of ways this book is about like my, it's sort of like a reckoning of like identity and kind of growing up, mixed race, growing up queer in the north of Ireland, feeling a bit at odds.

[00:05:38] W with that environment, not really knowing if I belong there, kind of searching for a sense of like meaning in the same way that the orange kind of move through the world and its meaning change. So the two strands of the book kind of interweave in that way. Whenever I'm like ruminating on things like my mixed identity or talking about like empire colonialism, anti-Asian violence and like the highly orange kind of.

[00:06:00] It pops up at these like different times in these different moments of history. So the orange is kind of like this vehicle for me, talking about much bigger things. And in that way it becomes like almost like a metaphor for mixed identity. But at the same time, it's also like tracing the literal fruit as it moved from east to west and then kind of.

[00:06:18] Back to Easter again and all around the world after that. 

[00:06:21] Lucy: Thank you for that. I think it's a hard book to sum up succinctly, so it's really nice to hear you encapsulate it like that. Katie, I was really blown away by how broad ranging foreign fruit is, even in terms of just location. We travel with you in the book to your family in Malaysia, but also to California to Vienna and tracing that history was just so fascinating.

[00:06:48] I don't think I'm ever gonna look, uh, at the orange in quite the same way again. I guess I wanna ask you. Why the orange? And when did you first start taking an interest in oranges or citrus? Generally? 

[00:07:04] Katie: Hmm. I mean, all my life I've loved the orange, but I think it, the book opens in 2021. It sort of opens with this line the morning after a white man murdered six Asian women, I yet five oranges.

[00:07:16] And that's like the origin of the sort of book beginning as well. So that was after their sort of the. Atlanta spa shooting is how it's kind of referenced a lot of the time when a white man murdered eight people and six of them were Asian women. And yeah, he like kind of, one of the reasons that was given for why he committed these murders was that he sort of saw Asian women as like sexual objects and sort of, there was like this like awful, um, like anti-Asian violence at the time around like COVID and things like that.

[00:07:46] So at that time I was really sort of thinking about. Writing about race and like how I'd been previously writing about race and sort of, I was doing, I began with journalism doing these sort of like personal writing pieces about like, as a mixed race person, this is why you should like, you know, treat us nicely.

[00:08:05] Or as a woman, this is how I feel. Or as a queer person, this is like why this thing is important. These sort of like, almost like caveating things or just sort of these like 800 words sort of pieces of personal writing that. Over time had like kind of worn me down a bit and like sort of thinking of identity in these very like, segmented ways and very like trying to make identity very palatable for people.

[00:08:27] I kind of got to the point where I was like, I don't know if I really wanna do this anymore. And I didn't really wanna write about the anti-Asian violence that was happening at the time. In that way, that sort of writing didn't feel like it was representing how it felt really to be in the world at that time.

[00:08:43] Uh, it felt like I was writing for other people and not really for myself. So I. After that sort of incident happened, that awful shooting happened. I at Five Oranges, like I say in the book, and I don't know why, I think they were just like what they had, what my parents had in their house, like I was staying at theirs during lockdown.

[00:09:02] And I wrote an essay about that sort of moment and wanting to like find new ways of writing. And I included the bit about like eating the oranges. And for that essay I started researching into citrus and I was like, oh, you know, like what can we find here for like citrus? Is there any like. You know, resonance is I can pull from this fruit for this sort of essay.

[00:09:22] And I found out that oranges, I think, I thought they were maybe like Spanish or Italian or something, but they come from China or they come from Asia and they've sort of moved through the world and I was just like reading these, like these histories of oranges and I was like, oh, this is really interesting how they've kind of.

[00:09:38] Moved from like east to west and their meaning has changed. They've become like this very ubiquitous thing, but they used to be very foreign. And also the orange is like a mixed hybrid for its parents are like the, is the pomelo and the Mandarin. And most citrus that we eat is a hybrid of sort of these like three parent citrus fruits, the Citron and the pomelo and the Mandarin.

[00:10:00] Everything else is a hybrid. That was really interesting. I was like, oh, like. Uh, me writing about being mixed, this like hybrid fruit, like there are sort of parallels there. And then I think also just the metaphoric potential of the orange is really interesting because it is like a segmented fruit that kind of can be broken down and then put back together again.

[00:10:21] And I was really interested in like writing about my identity and these things that I felt like had been, when I'd been writing about them, I felt like I'd been segmenting myself into these different. Pieces and like sort of portioned out when I was doing that kind of personal writing and I wanted to still write about that and still write about myself and identity, but I wanted it to all kind of coexist at once.

[00:10:41] Like I can write about being mixed race, but I can also write about being Irish. I can also write about being queer. I can write about things I'm interested in, in the world, religion, all these different things, and let the orange kind of hold all of that together. When I started to work on this book. I started researching more and more the history and especially around how the orange has was used as like this tool of like empire I found really fascinating because obviously European sailors, when they were like quote unquote discovering new lands, they needed to have citrus because they needed vitamin C so they wouldn't get scurvy and die.

[00:11:17] And you know, some historians will say that like orange is propelled empire like without like citrus fruit. We wouldn't have empire the same way that we. Have it not or had it because they wouldn't have been able to like reach so many like far off lands. And it's like, that's really interesting. Like this, like fruit, this like very mundane thing, sort of the way it like turns up in history over and over and over again.

[00:11:40] I just find so fascinating. And I don't think the orange is like particularly different from other fruit in that way. 'cause I, I'm sure you could do like a history of bananas or a history of like apples. Like some people have done that. And again, it's like, I think fruit is so interesting because it's really.

[00:11:55] Um, more than like vegetables or other kinds of food. It becomes very symbolic, I think because of Christianity and like kind of the Garden of Eden and Eve biting the apple. I think fruit is very, um, yeah, it's like very symbolic. It comes like a cipher for whatever meanings we wanna like throw on it. 

[00:12:13] Lucy: Yeah, that's, that's so true actually in comparison to like a leak or, I dunno, um, an opine or something.

[00:12:21] Yeah. So interesting to look at fruit in that way. So much to unpack there, just to come back to the colonial history of the fruit that you mentioned and kind of the history of citrus cultivation in that context. But I dunno if you could even really. Call it cultivation, just the way that it's documented.

[00:12:41] I mean, you talk about the English, I mean invaders really when they arrived in Barbados and they were just like scattering seed because they didn't really know, they didn't have the skills of the knowledge in citrus cultivation. And that's kind of a thread of the book as well, like this idea of taming citrus.

[00:13:02] And there's an example of, um, is it Stalin who wants to grow lemons outside? Yeah. And just demanding that they adapt to the climate in Russia, which they obviously don't. And this obsession with bending fruit to your will is so interesting. 

[00:13:20] Katie: I feel like with the colonial aspect, I think that that is something that.

[00:13:26] I find really fascinating because I think like when the book begins, the orange is like this kind of comfort almost for me, where I like, after those murder, like that murder happens, the, the shooting happens. I sort of eat these oranges and it's kind of becomes like, yeah, almost like this comforting thing.

[00:13:43] And then like using the orange to parallel my own family's journey, it kind of also, it's like something I can really hold onto and like grasp, hold off, and then learning more about the colonial aspect and it's like, oh, hang on. The orange or like citrus was very much involved with like colonial expansion.

[00:13:57] It's bit like, oh, I don't really get that kind of the same comfort. And like I think with writing this book, it kind of showed up my own, like, I dunno, my own issues as maybe too strong a word of problems, but like I was projecting so much onto this fruit in the same way that people have done that for like decades and you know, centuries as well.

[00:14:19] And it's interesting just like, hi. I think it's really interesting. It's like high sum, one piece of fruit can just like, it can mean lots of different things to different people and. The fruit itself is just a piece of fruit, but as humans, we're just always projecting onto nature. We're always projecting onto things.

[00:14:38] And like Stalin, like that sort of what you were talking about, I read that in Rebecca Sas, uh, gore, Wells Roses, that Stalin told his gardeners that he was just gonna grow lemons wherever they, they couldn't grow, like they wouldn't be able to. Thrive and he kind of wanted to master nature. And I think that's like a huge strand that runs through the book is like our human relationship to nature.

[00:15:00] And with fruit, I think it's really interesting because of it, it being cultivated and it becomes this food and this, um, like the oranges that we eat now do not, I imagine they do not taste at all or look at all like the oranges that first Corona grew on the Tibetan plateau thousands of years ago because they've been cultivated.

[00:15:20] To sort of appeal to every single, you know, everything we love, like the taste of them, the look of them, the scent of them, all of that has been like experimented on to, for us to desire them. And I'm kind of interested in questions of like authenticity as well. I think especially when it comes to like mixed identity being, mixed race, being queer, kind of like not fitting into like.

[00:15:44] I guess like stripped categories along the way, like sort of like binary categories, which is how we might very much like to categorize the world. Like, and then with the orange, because is it like authentically an orange if it's changed so much, if we've like cultivated it to become almost this like artificial thing, you know, like it's been patented, it's been like sort of like experimented on and mastered over all these years.

[00:16:09] Is that even like a piece of nature anymore or has it become something else entirely? So I think the, the huge strand of this book kind of questions when people normally very powerful people want to master nature and the sort of connection between mastering I. Nature and mastering humankind. AKA eugenics is a very clear link whenever you start to look at people who did that and then immediately moved into eugenics.

[00:16:37] And it's kind of fascinating that there's like this sort of. Yeah. A real connection between the two. 

[00:16:42] Lucy: Yeah. Yeah. So you've mentioned the line that the book opens with, which is after a white man murdered, six Asian women, a eight, five oranges, and this is a line that recurs throughout of, throughout the book, it's kind of a motif that you keep coming back to.

[00:17:00] And you've talked about, you know, that very visceral recollection and experience of that moment where you read this terrible news of this racist attack and you ate oranges, and it created this moment of reflection over time of how you've been writing about race and your own identity before and sort of came to reckon with it.

[00:17:24] So writing this book as a long form piece of. Writing that you have control over, I guess maybe in a way that you don't have control over the industrial complex of the personal essay for consumption by mass media. Did you feel tension in writing this sort of longer form piece of writing? Because you know there's the two strands.

[00:17:50] You've got the broader history of your fruit and then your own personal story. It must have been so difficult to keep hold of those two strands. In a way where you felt that you were being true to this very intimate personal story, but also getting caught up in, I imagine, accuracy, historical documentation.

[00:18:08] How did you keep hold of those two threads without losing your mind essentially? 

[00:18:16] Katie: Well, I did lose my mind. That's the secret. Um, I think, yeah, it, I think that I. Wanted like them both to speak to each other, like the historical strand and then also the personal strand. And I wanted to find like little like parallels or like, you know, things that would sort of, without having to like hit a reader over the head, like let them sing with each other.

[00:18:40] So like I write about how. There was like the Black death and like the plagues and how people sort of use citrus at that time is like, they thought it would prevent against the Black Death, but also the Black Death when it hit Europe. It became a moment where people were sort of, you know, looking for scapegoats and like a lot of Muslim communities, a lot of Jewish communities were, you know, sort of sacrificed by society and lots of people who were sort of seen as like.

[00:19:08] The unfit in society in quotes was they were sort of blamed for the, the pandemic that happened then. And then I also write about sort of the COVID-19 pandemic in that same chapter and about how anti-Asian violence that happened when COVID sort of hit. To be clear, like they're very different and to have different contexts.

[00:19:25] But there are these sort of like moments where history kind of rings with what's happening right now. And sort of they speak to each other and I want to like find different. Sort of moments in history where the orange kind of as it moves through the world and three different times, let the sort of moments of history that it's in and sort of context that the orange is in sort of.

[00:19:47] Speak to sort of the more present day narrative as well. Using the orange was really helpful because it meant that I was very limited with the sort of historical scope because I had to really like hone in and like follow the fruit around. So this book, it kind of spans a very long period of time. But because I'm using the orange as like the vehicle to talk about that history, it has to be very like hyperfocused in.

[00:20:11] I feel like from writing this book, it seems like I know a lot about history, but really I just know a lot about like the oranges history and sort of when it pops up in time, I wanted to, even though the book is dealing with like facts and like history and science, I wanted to use that sort of for the like metaphorical potential, if that makes sense.

[00:20:28] And sort of let that speak to the personal narrative. And I really wanted history in the past to kind of. Feel really present and like really bring people there. So the historical parts of the book are written in the present tense and the, my memoir parts are written in the past tense because for me that's like in the past.

[00:20:49] Yeah. I wanted to like really to bring the history, the past and the present together and let them just sort of exist at the same time. And I think the book also questions a lot about, like, history is a story. History is like a myth and like. The danger of that and also the comfort is sort of mythologizing the past and making narratives and how yeah, we can like push back against that as well.

[00:21:12] So yeah, it was like quite tricky to hold the two together. Yeah, I wanted to just sort of like give myself free rein to kind of play around with that a little bit. And I think history is not a very, it feels very linear when you're in it. It feels like everything in the past is kind of like leading up to right now in this present moment.

[00:21:31] And that is true, but I also think that. That sort of movement isn't always like progression, if that makes sense. Like I think like we think if like history, if like we're always moving away from it. And I think sometimes we're also moving towards history as well with like things that have happened in the past, we are kind of moving back towards them for better or worse.

[00:21:50] And I wanted to let the book kind of play with the idea and kind of, yeah, I guess like push back against the idea of like a traditional, both a traditional memoir and a traditional history of like beginning, middle, and end that it would. Um, you know, there's like this perfect sort of like arc to it and hopefully the book by kind of intermixing and like braiding the two narratives is playing with those ideas.

[00:22:13] Lucy: I love that I hadn't actually picked up on the tense thing with the history and personal narrative, but the history does feel very present and very alive, so that's obviously a really effective tool and as well as history. You must have had to be selective with the locations that you choose for the different chapters.

[00:22:34] How did you come to select where the chapters took place? Did they reveal themselves to you very obviously, or was it a very, very careful decision? 

[00:22:46] Katie: Yeah, I think I was like, some of them I chose quite carefully and then other ones kind of made sense. So the book is sort of structured, kind of like. How the orange moves around the world.

[00:22:58] So it begins like in China and it begins with the orange, sort of the first orange of appearing. I kind of give it this mythology because we don't really know, like no one was really there when the first orange appeared in the wild. So I kind of give it this like origin myth. And at the same time I talk about this trip I took to Long in China when I was a teenager, when I was sort of.

[00:23:21] I was really feeling like this sense of not belonging in the North Ireland and also not belonging in Malaysia as a mixed race person. And my family went on this trip to China, to our ancestral village where my grandparents are from. And I went on this trip kind of thinking that I would have this like big moment of like going home to like, like the, our ancestral land and feeling like a sense of connection to the land and the people.

[00:23:46] And finally I would have this sense of like belonging and. That did not happen obviously because I'm not from China like, and I have no connection to that place other than it is like where my family, one side of my family came from. And I went there and I was very much like a stranger and a tourist and it kind of popped that bubble of like if I return somewhere, I'll like feel the sense of like kinship.

[00:24:10] So the book kind of begins there and then the orange moves to the silk roads and then over to Europe and. Then over to California, Southern California, and I sort of follow the orange as closely as I can on my own trips and travels as I'm like kind of in the memoir parts of the book. Some of the places that we like I chose were quite like arbitrary, like.

[00:24:37] Part of the book is set in Vienna, for example, and that's just because that's a city that I travel to quite a lot 'cause my brother lives there. But there also is like this beautiful orange Andre there in a palace. So I wanted to talk about oranges arriving into Europe and it becoming this like symbol of luxury and forwardness.

[00:24:55] And these beautiful Andres were built like at Versailles very famously. There's like one of the biggest ones in Europe and at the time Kings were so. Interested in like mastering nature and also wanting to like nature to be very like, perfectly like sculpted for them. And there these like gardens, like that are like design within an inch of their lives.

[00:25:20] And in like orange rays, orange trees could, like, even if it was winter outside of Northern Europe, the orange trees would just like, they would blossom, they would fruit, they would, you know, exist. But in this very like arbitrary sort of. Climate and I, yeah. Wanted to talk about that sort of like those themes of like, I guess, what does it feel like to be like exoticized or how does it feel to like, as the orange is kind of treated, it's treated well because it's this sort of exotic fruit, and I was really curious about this idea of like.

[00:25:56] Different narratives around immigrants moving to Europe say, and there's this idea of like the good immigrant of like what that means. So yeah, I wanted to explore that idea and sort of chose Vienna because it's just a city that I have a lot of like attachment to personally. And then it kind of moves to, I.

[00:26:12] Southern California and that was we, I chose Riverside, the city in California because that's kind of like what's considered the home of like the American orange because that's where a lot of experimentation happened there. So, and then the book moves over to China, kind of ends there again. So yeah, it kind of, I wanted the book to like move geographically kind of around like a bit like an orange actually, like, um, have this sort of quality of always being.

[00:26:39] Moving through the world. I also wanted to it to not, I wanted it to move through the world, not like a map, but like a globe. So it could always kind of keep traveling on and it wouldn't be stopped by like a border at the end of the map. And I wanted to just feel like the orange could, yeah. Always be moving.

[00:26:57] And I actually kind of questioned like ideas of east and west through that. When the orange hits California and then it goes to China, it's going west, it's not going east in the way that we might think of like. You know, the far east. So I wanted the, the book structure to yeah, be like the oranges circumference of just always being able to like move in the round.

[00:27:18] Yeah. I think that the structure follows the orange, but then I kind of chose places like I kind of go back to Malaysia a couple of times in the book and like do these like repeat visits there as well. And I think I'm really interested in like visiting places over time and like how their meeting can change us over time as well.

[00:27:38] Because I think that there's this like idea that you could go in like especially travel writing and travel logs. You like go somewhere, you extract what you need from it and then you leave and then you kind of are able to like construct your narrative from that. And I think like I definitely do that with like the California chapter just because I went there to like find out like the history of the Californian Orange and then I left and I would like to go back there.

[00:27:58] But it's kind of like that extracting. Knowledge for your book, which I think is quite common in travel logs, whereas like I wanted to write about going to Malaysia repeatedly and how my relationship to that place also changes over my lifetime and how my relationship to like European places changes over my lifetime and like how repeated visits can kind of open up new things and Yeah, and like.

[00:28:25] I guess just create a space where I can like really think about my relationship to say like Malaysia and going back there over my lifetime and sort of wanting to replicate that idea of. Like how your mind can change or how your relationship to somewhere can change by just having these repeated visits in the book.

[00:28:44] Lucy: Yeah, I definitely have a discomfort around some, definitely some travel writing for the reasons that you mentioned. So yeah, that idea of kind of repeated visitation is, is really interesting. The note I made in the book when I was reading about your trip to the um, Riverside, the University of California campus is just, this is a dream trip.

[00:29:05] This is incredible. You are being led by Dr. Tracy Kahn, I think that's her name, who is the curator of this incredible collection of citrus varieties at Riverside University of California, and. You are just walking around these acres of citrus trees and she's cutting fruit down from the trees and just kind of like handing you bits of delicious citrus to the point that you are eating so much, your mouth's going numb.

[00:29:31] But then within this and within this chapter and the story, there's the other side, and that's the erasure of the labor of the people who really made the citrus cultivation in California possible. And. It's really like kind of a forgotten, you know, that they're not the people that are celebrated in relation to this industry essentially.

[00:29:57] Even though there wouldn't have been access to these fruits without the knowledge and the skills of the people that have been historically involved in growing and picking them. 

[00:30:06] Katie: Yeah. Yeah, it was really interesting going to Southern California to learn about that. 'cause it wasn't something that I, something that I knew about but not really connected to the oranges because yeah, whenever oranges came to Southern California, a lot of East Asian immigrants in Southern California worked in the groves because they had sort of the skills of, you know, like citrus cultivation is like a very ancient art in China.

[00:30:33] So they were able to use their skills. To cultivate these, this like growing industry and like citrus was like, other than the oil industry, I think it was just like the second biggest industry in southern California for a long time. So it really built the state and like brought in so much money. Yeah.

[00:30:49] Most of the people who owned that land were white men. And then they used this sort of like, like migrant labor and also a lot of like indigenous labor as well to like grow the fruit, pick the fruit, harvest it, but then. So they wanted all these Chinese immigrants to come and then build the railroads in America, cultivate the fruit in the fields and the groves, but then.

[00:31:14] Panicked whenever there were too many Chinese immigrants. Then they sort of had this like Chinese exclusion act, which it was one of America's first, um, like anti-immigrant piece of legislation. And then a lot of the people who built the railroads cultivated the fruit were then sent back basically to China or kind of left to live in poverty because no one would employ them.

[00:31:33] No one would buy their produce as well. Yeah, it's interesting there's like that sort of tension between. That's such an ugly period of history in America and with in like the citruses history as well in America. But at the same time, it built the sort of industry that then I was enjoying and sort of the present moment, like going to this like experiment, like what used to be the experiment station.

[00:31:58] I was, uh, citrus variety, collection and sort of. Enjoying the citrus and like the amount of pleasure that I took from citrus and on that trip and kind of holding these two things at once, like the joy something can bring me, even though it brought so much sorrow and so much shame as well. 

[00:32:16] Lucy: Yeah, totally.

[00:32:17] Um. The next thing I wanna ask you about feels connected to that, if not geographically, but in this kind of, um, colonial sense. I did an episode about citrus on Lecher a few years ago now, which basically just came out of the fact that I found it really interesting that in Britain in particular and, and also in Ireland, as, as you've talked about, we have this real obsession with citrus.

[00:32:41] I use the nursery rhyme, oranges, lemons, as kind of a thing to come back to and. Yeah, it was just, it was nowhere near as deep as you went, obviously nowhere near, but I just wanted to try and understand a little bit about why we're so obsessed with these bright fruits that have never ever been remotely native to our country.

[00:33:03] I. We've always had to kind of bring them to us, but there's this really long history of them being eaten in Britain. Mm. There's a historian called Charlie Tavenner, who I quote in the episode of, I did earlier, who writes about street sellers in London and Street Hawkers who sold oranges. That was a really big thing, and you know, from that day forth, the orange and the lemon and the other types of citrus, it feels very inescapable from like a half grapefruit in a breakfast buffet.

[00:33:31] That's, that feels a bit retro now, but you know. Very much was a thing. Lemon drizzle cake, most popular cake in the uk apparently the citrus behind bars. What was the presence of citrus in your life growing up? So you grew up in the north of Ireland, do you have memories of citrus from early on in your life?

[00:33:51] Katie: Yeah, I think so. Yeah. It's so interesting. Like people yeah, in Britain like just fell in love citrus immediately and it like, yeah it is a good uh, find out that. During like Elizabethan in the Elizabeth in London, whenever William Shakespeare was debuting his plays, like the audience would be eating oranges a lot of the time and they would like throw them at people's heads if they were like, I don't like this actor, get off the stage.

[00:34:14] They would just like toss their oranges because yeah, there was like, there were loads of orange sellers around, so they would just be eating oranges, which is like, you would never think like Elizabeth in London oranges like necessarily. But yeah, so I feel like. Like my most orangy memory is really like those easy pillars that my mom would like give to me.

[00:34:33] And then I would, they would get crushed immediately at the bottom of my school bag and I would just like, I would take out my like textbook and they would just be like citrus, smooshed it into the pitches. I think like that definitely like Jaffa cakes, Christmas time, like, you know, citrus season is winter and they always are appearing and people grew up with like making like tingles as well, which is like.

[00:34:55] The orange that you put a candle in. Yeah. Which is like, oh, that's a whole lot of thing. And the orange kind of represents the globe. And like the light is like God's light and like how it becomes like this really like symbolic. Thing for children to learn. 

[00:35:07] Lucy: I loved reading that section about the Chris Dingles because that was something I did as, as a child and had completely forgotten about My family aren't really religious, but it was just something we did, um, kind of in the community, in the village church and it really like brought it all back to you orange, the candle in it and the ribbon round.

[00:35:24] Katie: Yeah. And it's so interesting 'cause it's like. Doing like what the church did with that is kind of like what this book is doing in some ways where it's like looking at the orange like metaphor and like why does it like the globe and like, you know, the orange, the sphere representing the world. It's so interesting.

[00:35:41] Um. I think actually like growing up, I like associate citrus with like Malaysia, not really with Ireland that much. Like I really associate like going to Malaysia as a kid, like I was lucky enough that my parents would like pull me outta school. We would go to Malaysia for like two weeks when I was a kid.

[00:35:57] Um, and I would go and I would especially love Pomes, which is harder to forget over here, especially during like the nineties and early two thousands. It's really hard to get Pomes and also the variety that. Is more common, like commonly exported to the uk isn't the same type that we would grow or like get in Malaysia.

[00:36:17] So the small yellow honey pomes that usually you find in the UK aren't the type that I grew up eating. So it's really hard to get like Malaysian pomes. In Europe and the Malaysian ones are like, they're like tampon, pomelo, so they're like huge Green Globes. They're like so enormous and heavy and like really witty and they grow in the city of epo, which is where my dad grew up.

[00:36:45] It's like where my family's from and I have such strong memories of like going. To farms or like stalls and like picking out pomes, like really ripe ones and then coming home and it's really hard to like get into pomes because there's such a big beastie fruit and the R is so tough and my grandma would like get her knife and like cut around.

[00:37:04] Sort of like the belly of the fruit and then pull it out and it would be almost like this helmet, like you could wear it on your head. It was so, so massive. And then she would pick apart all of the pith off all of the segments. But then when she'd done that, she would put it back inside the pomelo and then put like the helmet back on and store it that way.

[00:37:23] So. Yeah, like the, like the pomelo kind of is like able to Yeah. Store its own. Yeah. It's like its own thing. Um, which yeah, I loved like watching her do that when I was younger and also going, I would go over to Malaysia a lot for Chinese New Year and Pamela's a really, like every house has a Melo in it during Chinese New Year because it kind of has come to like represent good fortune and like prosperity and these sort of things.

[00:37:51] And oranges as well. I really associate. With being younger and going to Malaysia for Chinese New Year and like my relatives would just give me an orange every time I left their house and we would like do all like the family dinners every night of the week. We would like go to a different house and they would always give you a little orange and we would give out oranges as well.

[00:38:10] And it became this sort of like gift giving kind of thing. But they were very like specific type of orange that I think, I think my grandma gets them from like I think Taiwan, maybe they come from, or China. It's like so extravagant. They come, each orange is like plastic wrapped in its own individual wrapper.

[00:38:28] Great for the environment, and there's like red characters on them, which are like good fortune and luck and things. So the orange, which is like itself in a case is then like put into this plastic wrapper, which is then put into this like huge red box that has like little like things to put each of the oranges into.

[00:38:45] So it's really like, it's like its own sort of like, I don't know how to describe it, but like the way that oranges are bought and sold at Chinese New Year, they really like, the packaging really gives you the sense of like ritual or like, this thing means more than just an orange. Like it really represents like fortune luck because of how it's packaged up and these like huge red boxes and everyone's like carrying these boxes around to like go home, um, to give out.

[00:39:11] So I think like my childhood association of like citrus really. Strongly is like with Chinese New Year and like high oranges and citrus is treated then more than like those easy pillars that are like crushed or crushed into my bag in Ireland. 

[00:39:27] Lucy: Yeah, weren't quite given the same reverence as the not quite wrapped ones.

[00:39:33] Not 

[00:39:33] Katie: quite. 

[00:39:34] Lucy: And did they taste different? 

[00:39:36] Katie: I, yeah. I think that they always tasted better after you took them out of their like plastic wrap because they were such like a ritual to it. And you're like, wow, this is such a, like, so much effort has gone into like packaging this for me that I always felt they tasted better even though.

[00:39:52] I don't know. I was like back in Malaysia recently and I had some and I was like, not that different to the ones that you get here as well. 

[00:39:58] Lucy: Oh really? Yeah. I was like, Hmm, I don't, that's the globalization for you. I don't 

[00:40:02] Katie: really know how special these oranges are. I think it's just the marketing is very special, but I think like the piels are like, you can get anything close to how they taste in Malaysia, like it's their next level.

[00:40:13] Like I, if I'm in Scotland for Chinese New Year, I'll like buy one of the honey pomes and. They just, they don't hit the same. They're just like, they're so, they've come so far. I feel bad for them. They've traveled so far. They're so dry, they're so sad, but it's better than nothing. So, you know, I'll take like a dry pomelo over no pomelo.

[00:40:32] Lucy: And the writing of this book must have been so educational in kind of a vast diversity of ways. Is there anything that really surprised you or kind of felt. Very relevant to what you wanted to get at in the kind of overall thesis of the book. Was there anything that was just like particularly poignant that you uncovered when you started to learn about the orange?

[00:40:59] Katie: I guess maybe like the grafting stuff's quite interesting, which is like is also one of the reasons why I wanted to focus on the orange of like the grafting as like a metaphor. Whenever people try to grow citrus, they. Don't grow it from seed, because that would be very foolish if you know anything about citrus because it's very unstable.

[00:41:19] So you could plant an orange seed and if you're lucky enough that it grows, which is quite hard and rare, you know, like a grapefruit could grow in its place because the sort of like genomic makeup of citrus is so wild, so wildly unstable that it's just really hard to get like a consistent sort of stock of citrus if you're growing it from seed.

[00:41:39] So how people cultivate. And grow citrus is that you graft it. So you take like the root stock, which is like a really strong, healthy, like good roots already in the ground and then you graft buds of different types of citrus to it. Um, so that'll flourish. But then because you're grafting, it means that you could graft different types of citrus.

[00:42:03] To each other. So like you could get like an orange tree and graph grapefruit onto it and it would survive and like thrive. Or you could graph like different branches. So like one tree could hold oranges, grapefruits, lemons, limes, like all these different things. And you could have this like multi beautiful multicolored citrus tree if you really wanted to.

[00:42:23] And I think that's so like I find that really. Again, like the sort of metaphoric like potential of citrus. It was just so good. Like rafting is this image where I think that like the family tree is quite a like patriarchal idea. It's quite like heteronormative, like nuclear family kind of idea of like, you know, you just follow the blood line of usually the like father down the line, but then the citrus tree kind of subverts that a little bit or kind of opens it up to like.

[00:42:52] It kind of queers it in a way that I think is interesting where if you can like graft anything onto a citrus tree, then it opens up the idea. Yeah. It opens up like what is a family? Or like, it just kind of subverts the idea that it has to like, you know, all grow naturally and be like top down almost.

[00:43:11] Yeah. I think it was really, I find that just so ripe for metaphor or just like it kind of freed up the idea of like the tree as. A very kind of oppressive image, like the family tree as an oppressive image, as like a queer person or a mixed race person of like who like our ideas of like ancestry can really be like subverted by using citrus.

[00:43:34] Lucy: I'm actually so glad you brought this up because I meant to look up this detail in the book before. We spoke and I forgot, so I can't remember the exact detail and I was like, can't really ask a question if, I dunno what the information is. So thank you. Um, but there's something in it, so maybe you can explain, there's a comparison of the very kind of like heteronormative, colonialist, really idea of the family tree.

[00:43:57] Very patriarchal. Um, in terms of how ancestry is depicted and the comparison, is it the rhizome of the citrus genome? Mm-hmm. You might have to explain that because as I've said, can't quite remember the details. 

[00:44:10] Katie: Yeah. So in the book I'm talk, I'm like drawing on the idea of like Gil Deus, who's a French philosopher and he, he didn't like him and his like philosopher buddies did not like the tree because they thought of it as very like western, very like, yeah, very like empirical, very like patriarchal.

[00:44:31] And they really fetishize, I would say the idea of like rhizomes, which they were like, that's very Asian. Like this idea of like. The rhizome is like, like almost like a sort of two birds where you don't really have a beginning or an ending, like kinda like garlic or like ginger, especially Ginger. They were really obsessed with the idea, which is why they really fetishized Asia and like the east is like this place where it was like, oh, such like rhic potential.

[00:44:56] And you're like, they do have trees in Asia as well. Like it's not just rhizomes, but they really love the idea of like, yeah, like if you have a. A bunch of ginger. There's not really a beginning or an ending. The way that a tree has like the tree tops and then like the roots and then there's like that kind of patriarchal top down idea, whereas the rhizome, because there's no beginning, middle or ending, it kind of froze that whole idea of like the patriarchal family tree away.

[00:45:24] It's like you have to like think of a different way of like organizing your thoughts or organizing history and time and. Yeah, I kind of was like, that's a really interesting idea. But then also I wonder if like Dilu ever saw like a citrus tree or like, you know, and the grafting potential and like the ability to bring together all these different types of citrus to sit together as one.

[00:45:46] Like to me, that kind of feels very subversive and like, like, yeah, like almost r in a sense that it's like you don't like what's really like the original part of that tree. Like there's not really. Even the root stock itself, it's like, well, we don't really, the root stock doesn't really have a connection to the fruit that's growing there.

[00:46:08] So is it the fruit that's growing on the tree that's kind of like the original, is it the root stock? It's kind of just like playing with this idea of like, I guess what we think of is like empirical, like science of like, well, it has to have come from like one place. It kind of just plays with the idea and it makes you kind of have to question.

[00:46:27] That thought, which I think in some ways is quite like ror, even though it's a tree. 

[00:46:32] Lucy: I love that. I think that's such a powerful kind of like position and statement. Um, and it was, yeah, one of my favorite bits of the book. So thank you for explaining that. I have to say that grafting absolutely blows my mind.

[00:46:46] Like I don't understand it at all. Yeah, I, it just doesn't seem real to me somehow, even though obviously happens every day. 

[00:46:56] Katie: Yeah. I like, I read, so I watched so many videos of like gardeners grafting stuff because I was like, how is this, like how does this even work? And I would watch these videos and I would be like.

[00:47:07] I still don't get it. It's like magic. How can something that comes from something else attach? It's like, it's just, it's incredible that like nature can adapt and like survive and heal and like also accept something forward into it. And I love that idea of like, I think we're very good at being like.

[00:47:24] Putting up these sort of barriers of ourselves and like othering people and othering things. But it's so cool that trees want to accept something foreign and are willing to like let something survive off them and like support other things. And it's like you'll learn a lot by looking at trees in so many different ways.

[00:47:40] But I think the idea of like, of accepting something that is once foreign to you is just a really. Beautiful way of like thinking about existence and like survival as well. It's like, oh, the best way of surviving means to, we should graft to each other.

[00:48:12] Lucy: Leika is hosted and produced by me. Lucy, dear Love, thanks to Katie go for being my guest on this episode. Foreign Fruit is out now, and there's actually gonna be some additional words from Katie on another episode of the podcast very soon, so stay tuned for that. And as I mentioned at the start, I'm so excited that Leer is now part of Heritage Radio Network.

[00:48:36] It means a lot as a diehard independent podcaster to have the support of HRN whose work and shows I've admired for a really long time, pretty much since LCA started in 2016. Actually they've been going since 2009. So really out here flying the flag for independent food podcasters. I'm hoping this is the start of a really exciting new chapter for Leika and Will mean I can bring more stories about food and people to listeners old and new.

[00:49:03] Nothing will change in terms of how you listen, but if you're a fan of leika, you should head to the HR N website linked in the show notes to discover dozens of fantastic food podcasts just waiting for you. Music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions. This is an independent podcast which is generously supported by listeners.

[00:49:24] If you enjoy what you hear and you're in a position to do so, you can sign up as a paid subscriber to support lcca on substack, Patreon and Apple Podcasts. The links are in the show notes and to any paid subscribers who are listening here. Thanks so much for your continued support. It means the world.

[00:49:41] Thanks for listening. I'll be back very soon.