Who Killed The Florida Orange?

Like palm trees, the Everglades, Disney World, and “Florida Man,” the orange is a classic symbol of the Sunshine State. But maybe not for much longer. Production has declined more than 95% in less than 25 years, setting off alarm bells across the industry.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

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• 0:42Dan Pashman?

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• 1:04Speaker 01

  Sirius XM Podcasts.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  How connected is Florida and the orange?

• 1:14Dan Pashman?

  You know, there's a reason it's on the license plate. It's a massive industry. I mean, is there another agricultural, I mean, Iowa and corn maybe is like on the same level? You know, actually, maybe an app comparison is like, it's like California and Hollywood. Like, it's on that level, I think. This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. Before we get into it, I want to remind you about our upcoming run of live shows at Little Island in Manhattan. We're going to be there on August 28th, 29th, and 30th. 5:00 PM shows. They're free. You don't need tickets. Outside, on the lawn, overlooking the Hudson River. And the show we're doing is going to be called The Great Yogurt Feud.

• 1:59Dan Pashman?

  Complete with great characters, intense rivalries, and free samples of yogurt. Plus, froyo for sale from our friends at Culture. Again, these are free shows, no tickets necessary. Details at sporkful.com/live. All right, let's get to it. Today, we're sharing an episode from our friends at Decoder Ring. It's a show from Slate about cracking cultural mysteries, hosted by Willa Paskin. We've teamed up with them before, once on an episode about whether hydration is all it's cracked up to be, and another time when they investigated how the jalapeno lost its heat. This episode dives into the death of an American industry, one that might surprise you: the Florida orange. Like palm trees, the Everglades, and Disney World, the orange is a classic symbol of Florida. But maybe not for much longer. How did it all go sour?

• 2:43Dan Pashman?

  Here's Willa Paskin talking with Slate reporter Alex Salmon.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  A couple of weeks ago, I read a piece one of my colleagues wrote about a beloved American classic, and I immediately reached out to talk to him about it.

• 2:55Dan Pashman?

  My name is Alex Salmon. I'm the features writer here at Slate.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  And Alex, like, what's your relationship to orange juice?

• 3:01Dan Pashman?

  I don't know. I think like, probably like most people, I drank it regularly, unthinkingly, as a child. It was refreshing and it was delicious. I mean, it was better than water and it was sweeter than milk, so, uh, yeah, it was great.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Orange is smart for drinking orange juice. For that clean and sunny taste. Hey, orange is smart.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  Wait, so I literally, I think I drank orange juice with every single meal in my childhood. I think I had orange juice as much as water.

• 3:35Dan Pashman?

  That's incredible.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  We used to, my sister and I used to eat, when my parents went away, we'd have orange for dinner. So we would have mac and cheese and carrots and orange juice.

• 3:44Dan Pashman?

  Wow, okay. I didn't have any color-coded meals, but I, I remember drinking it at school, I remember drinking it at home, you know, it was, it felt like it was everywhere.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  And the orange juice that Alex and I grew up with, the orange juice we guzzled down on every occasion at seemingly every location, famously came from one place.

• 4:03Speaker 04

  100% pure Florida quality orange juice. It makes you feel so good.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  The Florida citrus business has made billions crushing fruit and sending its juice all over the globe. Juice that proudly proclaims its origins. At the supermarket, cartons of Florida's natural OJ sit next to cartons of Tropicana that boast of being Florida squeezed. Florida itself is home to orange pageants, orange festivals, orange parades, and the orange bowl. And every year since 1924, it's hosted the Florida Citrus Show. And this past March, as Alex was hearing some surprising things about the orange business, he decided to head down to check it out.

• 4:47Dan Pashman?

  Trade shows tend to be pretty fun. You know, that's the day where you spend a little extra money and everyone has a fun time because they're technically on the clock, but not really like, in the heyday, it would have been like tents set up, like a street fair, like, it would be luxurious, it would be indulgent, it would be sort of spectacular, like a big party.

• 5:06Speaker 02

  But the 2026 version of the Florida Citrus Show was about as far from a party as you can get.

• 5:12Dan Pashman?

  This was like, it was like a funeral. You know, I sat there and it was just one after the next. It was like, this terrible thing is happening, it's getting worse, it's out of control. You know, it was dour.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Alex knew that the Florida citrus industry was struggling.

• 5:29Speaker 05

  To many people, Florida means oranges. But this year, Florida projects the worst citrus harvest since the Great Depression. These old fruit loaders represent just how far Florida's once booming citrus industry has fallen.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  But he'd been expecting to hear a measured assessment that however bad things were, there was some good too.

• 5:49Dan Pashman?

  So I was sort of like, oh, maybe it's a little overblown and maybe they, I'm just not understanding the state of things.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  There was nothing measured about the talk at the citrus show. The concerns were not overblown. The most positive thing he heard someone offer was that being a citrus farmer taught you how to deal with extraordinary challenges.

• 6:08Dan Pashman?

  There was no real sugar coating to the situation. It was like, things are really bad. You know, the, the minor problems are like drought and frost and like, what used to be the major problems, now those are, you know, secondary, tertiary, and we have all these other problems that are extinction level.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  And the bad news wasn't just at the citrus show. As Alex drove around Florida talking to farmers and agricultural experts, as he toured desiccated orchards and closed down processing plants, he learned the Florida orange is not dying. It's just about dead.

• 6:41Dan Pashman?

  The figure that's most outstanding in my mind is, in 2003, 2004, that season, the Florida orange industry produced 242 million boxes of oranges. It's a staggering quantity, huge. This year, the USDA was forecasting 12 million. And when I talked to people, they were like, there's no way. Like, we're not, we're not getting 12. We might not get 11. Like, we might not get 10. That's more than 95% decrease in less than 25 years. Just total collapse.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  It's crazy. I found that number crazy.

• 7:16Dan Pashman?

  Yeah, so did I.

• 7:18Speaker 02

  Part of what I found crazy about it is like, I had no idea.

• 7:21Dan Pashman?

  Yeah. And that's really interesting too, because obviously I had no idea, and that's why I thought it was, you know, I was like, oh, I gotta get down there and see what's going on with this. What, what I found while I was there was that people in Florida don't even know just how pronounced it is and how fast it happened. It's incredible.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Seeing the downfall of a recently mighty industry up close, Alex wanted to know what had happened.

• 7:46Dan Pashman?

  It felt like there's this murder mystery and the question is like, who could have done this? Like, who killed this great American icon? It felt like Clue or whatever. It was like, who did it, where and when?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  How does something as lucrative, as famous, as delicious as the Florida orange go splat?

• 8:06Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, Willa and Alex head to the scene of the crime. What do they find when they get there? That's coming up. Stick around.

• 8:18Speaker 06

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• 8:24Dan Pashman?

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• 9:05Dan Pashman?

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• 11:01Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to This Forkful. I'm Dan Pashman. Last week on the show, I meet two people with Prader-Willi syndrome. It's a rare genetic disorder that causes extreme insatiable hunger. Patients with Prader-Willi have to have food locked up. Otherwise, they could literally eat themselves to death. Basically, because of a disconnect between their gut and their brain, people with Prader-Willi will basically never feel full. Deanie Rao is the mom of 10-year-old Ione, who has Prader-Willi.

• 11:26Speaker 06

  So I'll never forget the first time after we'd fed Ione a full dinner, and she told me, Mama, I'm still hungry. I want more food. And it like broke my heart not to say like, okay, because I'm always saying like, have more food, have more food. I want to give you that. It felt like I am a terrible mother because I can't provide for my child. I can't give her that satisfaction of feeling full.

• 11:49Dan Pashman?

  The family had to completely rearrange their lives around this hunger issue. They were also able to hold on to the food traditions that were most important to them. In this episode, I also talk with an adult who has Prader-Willi, as well as the leading expert on the disorder. That's up now. Check it out. Also, you want to hear me and my family eat our way across Myrtle Beach? Stick around to the end of this episode for a special segment. All right, let's get back to our episode about Florida oranges. Here again is Willa Paskin.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  We're going to start our story the way murder mysteries so often do, with the detective visiting the scene of the crime. Earlier this year, Alex Salmon went to the largest orange grove in the United States. It's in South Central Florida, a stretch of orchard that's seven miles on each side.

• 12:30Speaker 07

  We went up and down the rows and, you know, what was once the largest orange grove in the country now is just seven by seven of dead trees.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  It's literally dead, like they're just all dead?

• 12:39Speaker 07

  They're all dead. I mean, they're in various states of decline. Some of them had produced a little bit of fruit, but the fruit was on the ground. Some of them had no leaves at all. They were just totally dried out, grayed and blackened. And yeah, it was just like that, literally for miles in each direction. Like you can see all the way, like all the way to the horizon, and everything was dead. It felt like the apocalypse. It felt like being on the other end of the apocalypse.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  If Alex had visited 20 years ago, he would have seen an orange version of Richard Scarry's Busy Town.

• 13:09Speaker 07

  The output from those trees was so great that every plot would have been full of workers. It would have been full of trucks. It would have been full of semis loading up. They would have been running it morning, noon, and night. It would start off early in the spring, and it might run until July, that they had that much fruit to pick.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  Even just last year, this grove alone was responsible for 35% of Florida's orange juice. And now it's a necropolis.

• 13:37Speaker 07

  And there were road signs everywhere that said like, slow down, busy area. Like, they're all indications that there had once been a ton of people here and a lot of activity. And it was, there was, there was nobody there.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  So that's the crime scene. And in the beginning, Alex was pretty sure he knew who done it, or what done it. The whole thing didn't actually seem to be much of a mystery to him. Because in the case of the Florida orange, there is a prime suspect.

• 14:07Speaker 07

  My sense was, okay, the killer is obvious. It is the Asian citrus psyllid, which is a one-centimeter bug the size of a flea that conveys citrus greening disease. Citrus greening disease is a bacteria that can kill a tree and cause the fruit to die or prematurely fall from the branch. This is because of the greening disease. This fruit probably died a month ago, this one, two weeks ago. Greening disease is conveyed by this bug. It lands on the tree, it bites the leaves, it infects the tree with a bacterial infection that gets into the roots and then effectively chokes the tree out via its vascular system.

• 14:50Speaker 07

  Over time, you know, it takes a while to show itself, but within three to five years, this little bug can effectively take out any tree that it lands on.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Why is it called greening disease?

• 15:01Speaker 07

  It's called greening because the fruit, initially the infected trees were producing these oranges that just wouldn't go orange, and they were just staying green.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Is it just cosmetic, or how do these green oranges taste?

• 15:13Speaker 07

  That is the, the knockout punch, is that the quality of the juice changed, and it tasted gross.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  That seven-mile-by-seven-mile orange grove that's now just a bunch of dead trees, that was caused by greening disease. And this is not just happening in this one grove. It's happening everywhere Florida oranges grow.

• 15:36Speaker 02

  How many trees in Florida currently have greening disease?

• 15:39Speaker 07

  Oh, 100%. 100% have citrus greening, which I thought was hyperbolic, and I would, I asked everyone I talked to, I was like, but how, what's the percentage really? Like, how many trees? And everyone said, it's 100%. Every single tree has greening.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Is it, is it currently considered curable?

• 15:59Speaker 07

  No, no. The official diagnosis is that it is incurable, and if it gets infected, it is a certainty that the tree will become unproductive and eventually die.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Needless to say, this is why when Alex first went down to Florida, he thought citrus greening disease had murdered the Florida orange. Case closed. But the more time Alex spent investigating, the less satisfied he felt with that conclusion.

• 16:27Speaker 07

  That's definitely a culprit. But after days of being there, it didn't seem to me like that was the only participant in this great murder.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  Look, I love a good plot twist. Who doesn't? But how could a disease that's in 100% of Florida's orange trees, and that kills 100% of the trees it infects, not be the killer we're looking for? Well, Alex learned something that I found surprising. Greening disease is over 100 years old and is now all over the world. It's in China and South Africa and Jamaica and Brazil.

• 17:00Speaker 07

  But only in Florida is greening an extinction-level event. It's the only place that greening has had this impact.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  So something else is happening in Florida then, right?

• 17:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. So something else is happening in Florida. And that, as we make our way through this murder mystery, that's a great question. How is that possible?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  How is it possible that this terrible bacteria has wreaked unprecedented havoc on oranges in Florida specifically? The answer, as Alex came to see it, is it had some help. And in order to understand who aided and abetted this murder, and exactly how, we first need to look more closely at our victim, the Florida orange itself. Oranges, the very word is touched with romance. For over 1,000 years, oranges have been the symbol of tropical luxury and abundance. The orange originated in South Asia and over hundreds of years made its way to the far western edge of Europe. Spanish explorers brought it to the New World, and by the 1560s,

• 18:03Speaker 02

  oranges were growing in northern Florida.

• 18:06Speaker 05

  They were so prolific that ship crews could tell when they were entering the harbor of St. Augustine because of the waft of orange blossoms in the breeze there.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Gary Morimmo is a professor emeritus of Florida Studies at the University of South Florida.

• 18:21Speaker 05

  It's an irresistible smell. Use your finger to scratch an orange and smell it. I mean, it's, it's a good smell.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  300 years later, millions were being shipped via railroad up the eastern seaboard. And then in 1895, for the first, but not the last time, the Florida citrus industry almost died.

• 18:42Speaker 05

  It's the greatest freeze in Florida history. The orange trees were exploding.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Temperatures dropped so low that when the sap froze and thawed, it caused the trees to literally burst.

• 18:54Speaker 05

  People in Orlando, Civil War veterans, they thought someone was having a gondola.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Before this huge orange tree exploding freeze, Florida citrus groves had been in the northern part of the state, around Jacksonville. But now they headed to the warmer south.

• 19:11Speaker 05

  The new citrus belt by the early 20th century is Polk County.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  This is the greatest citrus area in all the world. The vast groves of citrus trees stretch as far as the eye can see. Polk County is in the dead center of the state, just south and a little west of Orlando. It sits astride a geological formation called the Ridge, the state's sandy spine, and the only part of Florida that has never been underwater. Oranges love to grow in sand. And by 1940, Polk County had become the most prolific citrus-producing county in the entire nation. And it was about to become a whole lot more so. Orange juice for the troops. There's nothing new in tin food for the troops, but orange juice in tins is a fresh idea, as fresh as the juice itself.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  As World War II began, the military was eager to ply the armed forces with vitamin C. But they really didn't want soldiers to have to take vitamin pills. They wanted them to get their nutrients from food. Fresh oranges, which is mostly how the fruit was consumed at this point, would have been perfect for the job. But there was a problem.

• 20:16Speaker 05

  The great challenge with citrus had always been, how do you get the citrus to market before it spoils? Because it has a short life.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  So the Army couldn't send fresh oranges. What about orange juice? Orange juice did exist, but not at all to the extent that it does now. Fresh juice didn't keep. You had to live in Florida or California, where they grow oranges to get it. And canned juice, which could travel further, was not popular.

• 20:44Speaker 05

  Apparently, it didn't taste that great, a metallic taste. But nonetheless, if you have no other option, that's it.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  So despite tasting like battery acid, the Army started sending some canned juice abroad.

• 20:58Speaker 05

  They were shipping cans of Donald Duck orange juice.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Ladies and gentlemen, Donald Duck citrus products.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Sold under a special licensing agreement with Walt Disney Productions. The Army also began including lemon crystals to be mixed with water in rations. But soldiers disliked both so much, they weren't drinking them. So in 1942, the military provided funding to Florida-based scientists to develop a better tasting, longer-lasting orange juice. The solution they ultimately came up with was something like boiling orange juice down into a syrup and mixing it with some fresh juice before freezing it all. The product wasn't ready to ship, though, before the end of the war.

• 21:39Speaker 05

  But when the war's over, the industry now has a new way of selling juice. And it's the Godsend Frozen Concentrate.

• 21:54Speaker 02

  In 1948, Minute Maid hired the crooner Bing Crosby, who, to his great good fortune, got paid in shares, to introduce Americans to orange juice from concentrate.

• 22:05Speaker 06

  Ah, all those vitamins and minerals. That's for me, boy.

• 22:09Speaker 05

  Frozen concentrate, it's the perfect moment. Post-war America, we have a new prosperity. Families now have freezers. Grocery stores now have frozen food sections. It was the golden age of orange juice.

• 22:25Speaker 02

  Frozen concentrate was marketed heavily towards mothers with booming families. Here was a quick way to give your kids the nutrients they needed. All you had to do was take a cardboard tube out of the freezer, gloop the thick syrupy contents into a pitcher, and add water.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  It's so convenient. So give them a real break with delicious, pure, fresh-frozen orange juice from sunny Florida.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Between 1950 and 60, Americans' consumption of orange juice doubled, thanks to concentrate. But even that doesn't quite capture the scale of this product's cultural inroads. Orange juice went from being a rarity to a breakfast staple, the healthy, delicious juice of the American century.

• 23:06Speaker 05

  It became an iconic emblem of post-war America, that if you weren't drinking juice, you were mistreating your children.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  As orange juice sales ballooned across the country, so did the profits in Florida. It was as if citrus growers had struck oil. But instead of black old, juice was spurting out of the ground.

• 23:26Dan Pashman?

  The concentrate boom is the boomiest boom since the Brazilian rubber boom. The normal laws of economics are defied.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  That's an excerpt from the writer John McPhee's "Oranges," first published in 1966. It chronicled the golden age of the Florida citrus industry, in which the entire business transitioned from growing oranges to be eaten as fruit, to growing oranges to be juiced into concentrate.

• 23:52Dan Pashman?

  Most oranges are now grown for the frozen people, as the makers of concentrate are often called in Florida, and the growers' profits are determined more by volume than by quality.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Americans' unquenchable thirst for concentrate turned growers into some of the state's largest landholders and wealthiest families. Orange barons, whose names were everywhere: street signs, golf courses, football stadiums. There was even a 226-foot tower erected in the dead center of the state to showcase the surrounding bounty. From the top, you can photograph citrus groves that stretch to the horizon in all directions. Oranges had, by this point, become a part of the Florida myth, growing in lockstep with the state.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  In 1940, Florida had been a backwater, the least populated state in the South. But in the post-war period, as it pumped out orange juice, its population swelled, and so did its reputation as America's vacation paradise.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  That's the voice of Anita Bryant, former beauty queen and future anti-gay crusader, singing on behalf of the citrus industry. In this ad, Disney World, and palm trees, and sunshine, and oranges are all tangled up. They're the ingredients that make Florida. They're all part of what hooked Gary Mormino, future Florida Studies professor and an Illinois native who loves Florida with the zeal of a convert.

• 25:32Speaker 05

  I still remember driving by my first citrus grove in the 1970s. There was something just so beautiful about a rolling hill of these perfectly manicured orange trees. You know, we don't have these in Illinois.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Throughout the 1970s and 80s and 90s, the juice kept pouring, even as a technological innovation changed the business's best-selling product. The premium orange juice that I guzzled like water as a kid wasn't from concentrate. It was the pasteurized not-from-concentrate variety.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Not from concentrate. New, fresh, and natural orange juice. The name says it all. This innovation, figuring out how to pasteurize orange juice without killing the taste, further stoked America's thirst for OJ and kept profits skyrocketing. Growers and producers adapted to meet the demand. In Florida, hardly anyone was cultivating oranges to eat. They also packed their trees closer together, protected them with new kinds of herbicides, and expanded their operations to citrus-friendly climes like Brazil. And all the while, all the way into the early years of the 21st century, oranges and their juices continued to gush.

• 26:47Speaker 07

  From like 1900 onwards, the technologies and world events and stuff conspired to basically make, you know, orange juice the thing.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  Alex Salmon again.

• 26:57Speaker 07

  The amount of production's going up, the amount of consumption is going up, the acreage is going way up, like, everything is up. You know, the future's looking orange.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  And then it just, like, totally comes apart.

• 27:11Speaker 07

  I mean, really, it's just like, it just falls off a cliff.

• 27:17Dan Pashman?

  Stick a straw in it, it's done. We'll find out what went wrong when we come back.

• 27:27Dan Pashman?

  Sate, you stay, because it's time for some ads.

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• 28:52Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back. Let's return now to this orange mystery. Here's Willa Paskin again.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  So for a century, the Florida orange enjoyed limitless success. And then it all went pear-shaped. The obvious culprit was greening disease. But Alex didn't think it alone was to blame.

• 29:11Speaker 07

  It's like the firing squad, you know? It's like, everyone shoots, and it's hard to know what bullet actually got it. That's the only way you could have an outcome like this devastating this quickly. Everyone's in.

• 29:21Speaker 02

  Not to step on Alex's metaphor, but I've been thinking of it like Murder on the Orient Express, with a whole lineup of culprits collaborating to do in the Sunshine State's citrus empire. Not a murderer, but a murderer's row.

• 29:35Speaker 07

  The suspects were as follows. Suspect number one is that, like, Americans just turned against orange juice.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Here's the question: Are you pumping your child full of calories and fat-producing sugars without even knowing it? In the early 2000s, before greening disease was on growers' radar, a different kind of unexpected shock hit the industry: a growing awareness that OJ isn't exactly healthy for children.

• 30:01Speaker 07

  Most people, a glass of orange is made up of six or seven oranges. And there's more sugar in that than a Coke. And then, of course, it just sort of like moves up the ladder of age, where all of a sudden, like, low-sugar diets are very popular for adults. And that just sort of continues throughout the 21st century. People want caffeine, they want protein, they want other stuff in their breakfast beverage, but they don't want a bunch of sugar. And that's a huge issue that the industry does not foresee at all.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Sales of orange juice have dropped more than 50% since the turn of the millennium. That's not due to a virus. That's just because of changing consumer taste. So consider that the first big wound: Americans are over orange juice. Then, still years before greening disease took hold, a whole other economic sector kicked citrus's legs out.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Talk to me about what development and, like, the housing bubble and the sort of the years after the housing bubble, like, what is there a part to play in what's happened to the Florida orange?

• 31:00Speaker 07

  Florida, obviously, had this housing boom in the early 2000s, right? They built a ton of housing, and it was financed in very dubious fashion. And that story culminates with the giant crash in 2007, which ends up taking the entire global economy down with it, which is the Great Recession, right?

• 31:16Speaker 05

  It's a financial tsunami not seen since the Great Depression in the 1930s, after trillions were wiped off global stock markets and once revered institutions were swept off the face of Wall Street.

• 31:27Speaker 07

  The Florida real estate sector is the thing that kicked it all off. We know that Florida is at the epicenter of this, Kelly. It absolutely is, Maggie. Forecasters are predicting another 3 million foreclosures.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  By the end of this year, and here in southwest Florida, the numbers are already in the tens of thousands and rising. But even though overdevelopment had created the crisis and its aftermath, Florida politicians were desperate to jumpstart the real estate business again. So they loosened land regulations to help developers get back on their feet. The 2011 growth management law shuttered the state agency in charge of scrutinizing new development. Measures to curb urban sprawl are gone.

• 32:07Speaker 07

  And so the developers, you know, sort of like regather and get back to building. And coastal land in Florida is very expensive now, but the stuff inland in Polk County, that's not expensive. That's just farmland. That's just citrus land. And so all of a sudden, all the citrus land is in the crosshairs of these developers. So many growers are actually selling their land here to developers because they are no longer making enough money to sustain their groves here.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Development has been coming for orange groves for a long time. Disney World itself is built on groveland. But surprisingly, it's after the housing boom went bust, the development of citrus land amped up further still.

• 32:50Speaker 07

  Everywhere you see a tree is probably a pretty lucrative place to build a house or a condo or a McMansion, you know, or a trailer park. And once those trees are out, they're not coming back in.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Alex saw all this for himself when he got a guided tour from an industry veteran named Rick Danzler.

• 33:09Speaker 07

  Rick was a third generation from Polk County, which is right at the epicenter of the Florida citrus industry. His father had grown citrus. His wife's family had grown citrus. When I talked to him, he was like, I'm happy to show you this stuff, but it breaks my heart.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, like what did he show you? What do you see?

• 33:26Speaker 07

  We drove around legitimately for hours. We drove from one spot to the next. And he would be like, this used to be an amazing grove. This used to be one of the best groves in Florida. And it was, it was like a Publix. It was like a brand new grocery store with a giant parking lot out front. And then we'd go to the next place and he'd be like, this is an outstanding grove. And it was a Circle K gas station. And then we'd go to the next place and it was like, uh, just a dirt lot getting prepared to be made into housing. And it's crazy because these housing developments were named after the citrus stuff that had once been there. And so, you know, we were driving down Tangilo Court and, you know, Valencia Acres and Citrus Place. And it was genuinely like really emotional. It was just

• 34:09Speaker 07

  like, this motif of the end was just so in your face. It was like everywhere we turned.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  So the crashing of consumer taste for OJ, the development of groveland, all of this was happening before greening disease arrived and then alongside it. And there were even more culprits. Company consolidations, acquisitions, and eventually the entrance of private equity put more pressure on profits. Brazil, which has grown more oranges than Florida since the 1980s, kept increasing its output and taking more and more of the market share. And then there's the climate. The highest wind gusts from Hurricane Irma here in Florida, 142 miles per hour.

• 34:52Speaker 07

  There's a giant vacuum sucking everything out. For legitimately decades, a lot of these citrus groves saw no storm activity whatsoever. Through this glory period, we're talking about the second half of the 20th century, it just didn't happen. You didn't see hurricanes making landfall up on the ridge. It just wasn't part of the way hurricanes behaved. But then from 2015 onwards, it's just nonstop activity. There were five major storms that went straight over groveland, and that was devastating. Hurricane Ian drenched Florida citrus groves last month, sending oranges to the ground and causing tree damage growers haven't yet fully assessed.

• 35:34Speaker 07

  You know, half, half your crop gone in the night. There's nothing that you can really do to prepare for something like that. The wind is extremely deleterious to the trees because they're so shallow with their roots. The water sitting on top of the sand is really bad for disease and root decay.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  And they, do they spread greening, the storms?

• 35:55Speaker 07

  Yes. It turns out that, uh, you know, those winds, they don't just terrorize the tree. They, they move the bug around. And of course, the psyllid does have wings, but it's not a distance flyer. It's tiny. But the wind is a very capable conveyor belt of those little bugs. And so as it turned out, that sort of finished the job in terms of the spread of the psyllid, that the hurricanes would come through and they would disperse that bug much more quickly and wider than it ever would have been on its own. And so that is another accelerant that got us to the point where we have 100% infection rate.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  So now we can get back to greening disease. That little insect, the psyllid, may be our killer. But you can see now that thanks to hurricanes, this bug descended extremely quickly upon a weakened industry, one with an increasingly unpopular product that was fighting to hold on to its groveland. And that's not all. There's another reason that greening disease has been so unprecedentedly devastating in Florida. And it goes way back to before the weather got crazy, before the housing boom boomed, before Americans turned on orange juice. It goes back to when we loved OJ so much, growers would do anything to grow more oranges to juice.

• 37:15Speaker 07

  So in the seventies, you had the rise of glyphosate, which is an herbicide that was seen to be incredibly effective at killing off anything deemed invasive.

• 37:26Dan Pashman?

  Roundup herbicide by Monsanto. There's never been a herbicide like it before. Roundup translocates down and throughout the entire plant.

• 37:36Speaker 07

  The Florida citrus industry was one of the great early adopters of glyphosate as a core part of its production cycle. And they would spray until there's no signs of life other than the orange tree. There was a term called like clean culture was what it was referred to. And it was like, there is nothing on the ground that isn't an orange tree.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  So like, basically like, starting in the seventies, it's like sand or sandy soil with like oranges growing out. Like there's no, there's nothing else there, right?

• 38:03Speaker 07

  Right. There's nothing else. Yeah, exactly. It's like before there might've been some greenery on the ground or some other crops interspersed. Now it's just trees and sand. And you're getting that packed super tight and you're getting it for miles in all directions. And for a little while, it was freaking great. But this herbicide, which will kill every other plant, is also hard on the tree itself. The tree isn't immune to glyphosate. And so as it's absorbing these chemical compounds, the tree becomes unable to absorb other nutrients from the soil that would allow it to defend itself from disease and to mount its own defense against bacterial infection, viral infection, you name it.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  So like basically like without knowing it, like they spent 30 years like growing the citrus industry and like making it so they could make, you know, so much oranges, but radically undermined like the health of those trees over time. And so as soon as like something comes along that they can't treat with glyphosate, like the tree is like, we don't got it. Like we're just like a weak little, and like they're just like kick it. That's what happened?

• 39:06Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, it's mixing metaphor and straight ahead statement, but like, it really is like sowing the seeds of their own demise. It was like, every time they turned to more and more of this chemical, they weaken the tree and weaken the tree and weaken the tree. And then eventually something came that was able to challenge the health of the tree and the tree was not able to mount a defense when it otherwise would have been able to. And that's how you get a total collapse of every grove, of every tree.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Florida sowing the seeds of its own demise doesn't just describe its use of glyphosate. It describes what it literally planted. One reason the Florida citrus industry has been so hard hit is because it essentially only grows oranges to sate Americans' once insatiable desire for OJ. What that means is that it doesn't grow many different kinds of citrus, and it doesn't grow oranges to be eaten as fruit, which can fetch a higher price at market. Basically, when it comes to oranges, Florida's not diversified. So when greening arrived, much faster than in other places like California, it was really hard to pivot to other varieties and other sales models. The whole thing just came down like a pile

• 40:20Speaker 02

  of bricks.

• 40:21Dan Pashman?

  It is an industry on the brink because of a tiny bug threatening to squeeze every drop of life out of it.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  So citrus greening, which arrives in like, you know, this such a notice around 2006.

• 40:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  What are they doing to fix it? Like, what do they try?

• 40:35Speaker 07

  You know, they try a bunch of chemical treatments to find an aggregate chemical solution. Tree steaming was one of the things that they came up with. Basically, you would, you take each individual tree and you put it in a bag. And then you basically give it this sauna treatment where you turn it up to like 135 degrees. And apparently it looked horrible. Like the trees looked like hell after this and they would lose all their leaves and they, you know, but then they would grow back and it would look verdant and they would look hardy. And for years, people were like, this, this is it. This is the solution. Like we finally figured it out. And then it turned out, of course, that the bacterial infection was in the roots. And so you're killing the tree up top and regrowing it, but it doesn't touch the root system, which is where the disease actually lives.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Now the cutting edge treatment is to inject trees with oxytetracycline, an antibiotic used to treat chlamydia and syphilis in humans. There are concerns about this drug regimen increasing antibiotic resistance in general, but it does seem to improve leaf cover and fruit. That is until every four months, when the tree gets infected again and they need another injection.

• 41:45Speaker 07

  So it's like this incredible rolling of the boulder up the hill where it's like, you have to be treating it constantly. It's going to get reinfected. The old trees can't handle it because it's just way too potent of a chemical cocktail. So they die. The young trees can put up with it, but it's unclear how long. They can't figure it out. There just isn't a solution. I mean, the one sort of success story I would say that is the reason there are any oranges at all really is they have this thing called CUPS. It's an acronym for citrus underprotective screening, which is like this mesh net that you can put the trees underneath. It's just very expensive.

• 42:21Speaker 02

  So you're saying the only orange trees that are like likely to survive in Florida are the ones that can have their own private mosquito net?

• 42:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, basically. Yeah. And they're massive. So it's like a hybrid greenhouse, basically.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  Under these massive screens, wind speeds drop, rainwater is regulated, and sunlight is diffused without the bacterial infection that's destroyed so many traditional groves.

• 42:44Speaker 07

  It is super expensive, but it will produce a fruit. And so the reality is that not going to be zero oranges. They're just going to be an extreme luxury product that is made basically by hobbyists or incidentally in Florida. It's not going to be Florida citrus industry. There are just no Florida left.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  The total collapse of the citrus industry has to this point been a uniquely Florida problem. But it may not remain one for long. These orange killers, they might be serial.

• 43:19Speaker 07

  Brazil has followed in the footsteps of the Floridian citrus industry. They have also embraced glyphosate with a zealotry that's similar to the way Florida did, and the rate at which Brazilian orange trees are getting infected with citrus greening and incapacitated by it has shot up dramatically. And so it's not at the same level yet, but the trend line is extremely troubling.

• 43:43Speaker 02

  Is there any hope about like, are they trying to make GMO, like are they trying to genetically engineer some trees? Is that gonna happen?

• 43:52Speaker 07

  It was conveyed to me multiple times that they believe that they have done the amount of gene editing needed to create a tree that is resistant to greening, that will grow a palatable fruit product, and that like that exists. Today, a major announcement from University of Florida scientists. They added a gene to citrus trees that generates a special protein that's fatal to cillids. But then, of course, the question is, how does the timeline look? Okay, if that exists, you grow it, you plant it, it has to prove itself as a viable tree in studies, so that's gonna take, you know, three to five years minimum. Then you have to breed a ton of them, then you have to get people planting them at commercial

• 44:34Speaker 07

  scale, and then you have to wait for those trees to grow oranges. And so one researcher after another said like, help is on the way, but the timeline is 12 to 18 years before these trees are viable at a commercial scale. Can you afford to hold out a decade and a half if you're already losing money? Well, we know the answer to that, and the answer is no. Like, that is an impossible ask, and I don't think that they've been able to reconcile that development with the reality of the timeline, which is that like, time's up.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  I drank orange juice unthinkingly as a child, but working on this piece, I realized as an adult, I go ages without a drop, which of course is part of orange juice's problem. Despite foregoing it for years at a stretch, though, I know I'd miss it if it was gone. And now I also know there's a lot more pathos in each swig than I had imagined.

• 45:33Speaker 07

  To me, it feels like a really American story. It's a story of a very American product that really speaks to the American century. I think it's a story of American hubris, too. It's like the sort of unwillingness to address structural problems head on. I mean, I think it has a lot to say about our moment in this country and where we came from and where things might be headed.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Did you drink a lot of orange juice to work on this piece?

• 45:58Speaker 07

  You know, I had some. I definitely like was much more cognizant of it.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Are you like pity buying Trump? Like, oh, you go to the bodega, you're like, get a bagel, you're like, I will now also buy orange juice, just like help?

• 46:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, on the plane back, I was having my Minute Maid orange juice off the drink cart. Yeah, you know, I think I have more of an appreciation for it, you know? It's just a chapter of American history that's, you know, I think closed probably more quickly than we expected.

• 46:35Dan Pashman?

  Our thanks to Willa Paskin, Alex Salmon, and the whole Dakota Ring crew. If you're looking for more food mysteries from Dakota Ring, check out their episode about how the prune industry tried to salvage its reputation. That one's from February, it's a really fun one. Next week on the show, I hop into the salad spinner with Tanya Sachinsky from The New York Times and Zach Stafford from the Vibe Check podcast. We discuss a food ordering app where the food never actually comes, so-called functional candy, and Burger King's big comeback. That's next week. While I wait for that one, check out last week's episode about Prater Willie Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes insatiable hunger. We talked to two people with the disorder, as well as family members, to understand what it's like to live with Prater Willie. That's up now. This episode was produced by Katie Shepherd and Evan Chung, Dakota Ring's supervising producer.

• 47:19Dan Pashman?

  It was edited by Josh Levine. Dakota Ring is also produced by Willa Paskin and Max Friedman. Merritt Jacob is senior technical director. The Sporkful team includes me, along with managing producer-

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Emma Morgenstern.

• 47:30Dan Pashman?

  And senior producer- Andres O'Hara. Our technical director is- Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Sirius XM Podcasts. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  And I'm Johanna from Gainesville, Florida, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

• 47:58Dan Pashman?

  This segment is brought to you by Visit Myrtle Beach.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Right now, we're standing in the brew house. This is where all the magic happens as far as all of our beers get made, our brewmaster gets down to work and makes all the great booze we sell here.

• 48:12Dan Pashman?

  So when you call it Title Creek Brew House, it's not just a cute name. This is actually a brew house.

• 48:17Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 48:18Dan Pashman?

  This is Josh Ashley. He's the executive chef at Title Creek Brew House in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I stopped in for lunch earlier this summer. Josh was kind enough to give me a tour of the place while I waited for the rest of my family to get there. Well, let's walk through here. Tell me a bit about the operation.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Well, this right here is kind of our small batch area where they have new beers come out weekly, and then we have-

• 48:37Dan Pashman?

  They have 19 beers and ciders on tap at Title Creek. A wide range of styles with rotating seasonal options, plus craft cocktails and beer cocktails, including a Michelada and a Lagorita, basically like a margarita with a couple of glugs of lager. Inside, Title Creek has wooden tables and high tops with board games for kids and grownups. Then Josh showed me around their various outdoor spaces, from a shady deck to the backyard, where they have lawn games, hammocks, and areas for live music and fire pits.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  And then we have some more seating over here. We have our dog run, it's a very dog-friendly place. We have a menu for the dogs. They eat well-

• 49:10Dan Pashman?

  Really?

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Yes, sir.

• 49:11Dan Pashman?

  What's on that menu?

• 49:12Speaker 03

  We have a dog bowl, which consists of some turkey sausage and white rice, and we have Argus malt liquor. It's just beef broth with some veggies in it, so if they get to come in, eat, eat nice and healthy as well.

• 49:24Dan Pashman?

  After getting the tour, I ordered some drinks at the bar and grabbed a table for the fam. I did get a flight of beers. I got the Breezy, which is their blonde ale. I got the Backwater Brown, brown ale. I got the Harmonic Hefeweizen, and Janie got a crisp apple cider, so four little tastes of those four. Of course, I needed some food, too. I ordered fried green tomatoes and a soft pretzel with beer cheese. Then I had to try one of their famous burgers. Josh talked me through the options.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  So our Brewmaster burger is short rib and sirloin mix. Cook however you want it, you know? I like mine medium rare, preferably, and it has our in-house smoked pulled pork on it, and then it also has our pimento cheese, which we make in-house. Then we also make the tomato jam in-house.

• 50:12Dan Pashman?

  What makes this tomato jam special?

• 50:14Speaker 03

  Uh, it's just some of those green tomatoes that we get, and some nice plump Roma tomatoes, and cook them down real slow and hit them with the brown sugar at the end to finish them off, so you get that nice little tangy sweet. It goes well with the pork and the pickles.

• 50:27Dan Pashman?

  That sounds phenomenal. Now, you got the classic burger, black and blue with the blue cheese, mushroom Swiss. All of them, you're using short rib and sirloin, so these burgers are not messing around.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  Not messing around.

• 50:37Dan Pashman?

  I don't have enough time to eat all the things I want to eat here.

• 50:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's why you have to keep coming back.

• 50:41Dan Pashman?

  That's right. I went with the first burger Josh talked about. The food is here. This Brewmaster burger, I'll be honest, I was a little skeptical because I get worried when burgers have too many different things on them, but this is flawless. The pulled pork is so soft and tender and delicate. The burger, my rare burger is cooked perfectly, and then they put the pickles on the bottom instead of the top. A bold choice, to be sure, but it really makes sure you don't miss the pickles with all these other things going on. Now, Janie, you threw me a curveball at your order. This is a place known for its beer and its burgers, and you ordered?

• 51:19Speaker 02

  I ordered the hummus toast. You know, I love avocado toast.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  It's a similar type of structure as like the toast, and there's hummus and cucumbers and a vinaigrette and some greens. It's so good. They make their own hummus here, and I know this might be even better than avocado toast.

• 51:38Dan Pashman?

  I'm gonna try the hummus toast.

• 51:42Dan Pashman?

  That is good. Janie wasn't the only one to put Title Creek's vegetarian offerings to the test. Emily, you are an aficionado of Caesar salads. How do you rate the Caesar salad?

• 51:52Speaker 06

  It's very yummy, and I give it a 10 out of 10.

• 51:55Dan Pashman?

  Thank you again to the sponsor of today's segment, Visit Myrtle Beach. And as I saw at Title Creek Brew House and so many other places we went to, delicious food, great drinks, warm Southern hospitality, and so family-friendly. I mean, Janie and I love a place that's got board games, but the kids love board games, too, and they got this beautiful outdoor space little kids can run around. Just imagine sitting outside on a beautiful evening, craft beer in hand, delicious burger, fire pit, music. I mean, it's a dream. And that's just one place. Myrtle Beach has over 2,000 restaurants, all kinds of styles, all kinds of flavors, from Atlantic seafood to Low Country Fair to Southern classics. If you've got the whole family in tow, you can still find a place to relax and enjoy amazing food.

• 52:38Dan Pashman?

  With 60 miles of beaches, make Myrtle Beach your place by enjoying food you love with people you love. You belong at the beach.

• 52:47Speaker 03

  Hey, it's me, Teddy Swims. You hear that? That's life. So go grab it. Grab your old friends, grab new friends, grab a white claw. Grab flavor for everyone in your group. Grab music, laughter, and moments you'll never forget. You'll never regret it. Oh, hey, man. Grab new friends, grab old friends, grab life by the claw, White Claw.

• 53:12Speaker 07

  Please drink responsibly. White Claw Celta Works, Chicago, Illinois.

• 53:15Speaker 02

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