Who Killed The Florida Orange?

>> How connected is Florida and the orange? >> 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? And 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 Sporkfall. That'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, five 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 Fude. 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 sporkfall.com/live. All right. Let's get to it. Today, we're sharing an episode from our friends at Dakota 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 in Disney World, the orange is the classic symbol of Florida. But maybe not for much longer. Had her to all go sour. Here's Willa Paskin talking with Slate reporter, Alex Salmon. 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. My name is Alex Salmon, I'm a features writer here at Slate. And Alex, like, what's your relationship to Orange Juice? I don't know. I think like probably like most people I drink 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 yeah, that was great. We do, I literally, I think I drank orange juice with every single meal in my time. I think I had orange juice as much as water. That's incredible. We used to my sister and I used to eat when my parents were in my way. We'd have orange for dinner, so we would have mac and cheese and carrots and orange. Wow. Okay. I didn't have any color-coded meals, but I remember drinking it at school and were drinking it at home. You know, it felt like it was everywhere. 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. 100% pure Florida quality orange juice, it makes you feel so good. 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 tropecana that boasted 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. 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, tense set up, like a street fare, like it would be luxurious, it would be indulgent, it would be sort of spectacular, like a big party. But the 2026 version of the Florida citrus show was about as far from a party as you can get. This was like, it was like a funeral. You know, I sat there and it was just one half the next. It was like, this terrible thing is happening, it's getting worse, it's out of control. You know, it was dour. Alex knew that the Florida citrus industry was struggling. To many people, Florida means oranges, but this year, Florida projects the worst citrus harvest since the Great Depression. These old fruit lures represent just how far Florida's once booming citrus industry has fault. He'd been expecting to hear a measured assessment that however bad things were, there was some good too. I was always sort of like, oh, maybe it's a little overblown and maybe they, I'm just not understanding the state of things. 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. There was no real sugar coating in the situation, it was like things are really bad, you know, 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 at the extinction level. And the bad news wasn't just at the citrus show. As Alex drove around Florida talking to farmers and agricultural experts as he tore desiccated orchards and closed down processing plants. He learned the Florida orange is not dying. It's just about that. 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 talk 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. It's crazy. I found that number crazy. Yeah, so did I. Part of what I found crazy about it is like, I had no idea. 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 got to get down there and see what's going on with this. 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. Seeing the downfall of a recently mighty industry up close, Alex wanted to know what had happened. 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? How does something as lucrative, as famous, as delicious as the Florida orange go splat? 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. Hope you're hungry because it's time for some ads. Looking back to this forkful, I'm Dan Pashman. Last week on the show, I meet two people with Prada Willy syndrome. It's a rare genetic disorder that causes extreme insatiable hunger. Like, patients with Prada Willy 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 Prada Willy will basically never feel full. Dini Rowe is the mom of 10-year-old Ioni who has Prada Willy. So I'll never forget the first time after we'd fed Ioni a full dinner and she told me "Mama, I'm still hungry, I want more food." And it broke my heart not to say, "Okay, because I'm always saying, 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. 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 talked with an adult who has Prada Willy, 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 at 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. 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 7 miles on each side. We went up and down the rows, and you know, it was once the largest orange grove in the country. Now it was just 7 by 7 of dead trees. It's literally dead. They're just all dead. They're all dead. I mean, there are 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, grained, and blackened. And yeah, it was just like that, literally for miles in each direction. 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. If Alex had visited 20 years ago, he would have seen an orange version of Richard Scari's busy town. 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 till July, that they had that much fruit to pick. Even just last year, this grove alone was responsible for 35% of Florida's orange juice. And now it's enough. And there were road signs everywhere that said like slow down, busy area, like there are all indications that there had once been a ton of people here and a lot of activity and there was nobody there. 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. My sense was okay the killer is obvious it is the Asian citrus silib 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 of the green and disease this fruit probably died a month ago this one two weeks ago. Greening disease is conveyed by this bug 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 over time. 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. Why is it called greening disease 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. Is it just cosmetic or how do these green oranges taste that is that the knockout punch is that the quality of the juice changed and it tasted gross. That's 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. How many trees in Florida currently have greening disease? 100% 100% have citrus greening which I thought was hyperbolic and I would I asked everyone I talk to I was like but what's a percentage really like how many trees and everyone said it's 100% every single tree has greening. Is it is it currently considered curable? No no the official diagnosis that it is incurable and if it gets infected is a certainty that the tree will become unproductive and eventually die. 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. That's definitely a culprit but after days of being there didn't seem to be like that was the only participant in this great murder. 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 a hundred years old and it's now all over the world it's in China and South Africa and Jamaica and Brazil. But only in Florida is greening an extinction level event it's the only place that greening has had this impact. So something else is happening in Florida then right? Yeah exactly so something else is happening in Florida and that as we make our way through this murder mystery that's the great question how is that possible. 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. Orange is the very word is touched with romance for over a thousand 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 oranges were growing in northern Florida. 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. Gary Mormimo is a professor emeritus of Florida studies at the University of South Florida. Yeah it's an irresistible smell use your finger to scratch an orange and smell it I mean it's a good smell. 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. It's the greatest freeze in Florida history the orange trees were exploding. Temperatures dropped so low that when the sap froze and saw it caused the trees to literally burst. People in Orlando Civil War veterans they thought someone was having a gun duel. 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. The new citrus belt by the early 20th century is Polk County. This is the greatest citrus area in all the world. The vast groves of citrus trees stretches far as the eye can see. Polk County is in the dead center of the state just south in a little west of Orlando. It sits astride a geological formation called the ridge the state sandy spine and the only part of Florida that has never been underwater. Orange is 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 tin is a fresh idea as fresh as the truth itself. As World War II began the military was eager to apply 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. The great challenge with citrus had always been how do you get the citrus to market before its boil because it has a short life 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 can juice which could travel further was not popular. Apparently it didn't taste that great metallic taste but nonetheless if you have no other option that said. So despite tasting like battery acid the army started sending some canned juice abroad they were shipping cans of Donald duck orange juice. Ladies and gentlemen Donald duck citrus products 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. But when the war is over the industry now has a new way of selling juice and it's the godsend frozen concentrate. Here's wonderful news for you and me that made gives one vitamin C. In 1948 minute made hire the crewner Big Crosby who took his great good fortune got paid in shares to introduce Americans to orange juice from concentrate. All those vitamins and minerals that's for me boy. 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. Frozen concentrate was marketed heavily towards mothers with booming families. Here was a quick way to give your kids the nutrients they need it. All you had to do was take a cardboard tube out of the freezer. Glue the thick syrupy contents into a pitcher and add water. It's so convenient. So give them a real break with delicious pure fresh frozen orange juice from sunny Florida. 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. It became an iconic emblem of post war America that if you weren't drinking juice you were mistreating your children. 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. The concentrate boom is the boomiest boom since the Brazilian rubber boom. The normal laws of economics are defied. That's an excerpt from the writer John Lee. McFee'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. - 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. - Americans' unquenchable thirst for concentrate turn 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. - Orange's had, by this point, become a part of the Florida myth, growing in lockstep with the state. - Come to the Florida sunshine tree. - 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. - Is it orange bird in the Florida sunshine tree in Bob Disney World, and remember, Christmas without ice juice is like a day without sunshine? - 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. - 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 ill, no way. - 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. - New Russian natural, not from concentrate. New Russian 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 climbs like Brazil. And all the while, all the way into the early years of the 21st century, oranges and their juices continued to gush. - From like 1900 onwards, the technologies and world events have conspired to basically make orange juice the thing. - Alex Salmon again. - The amount of productions going up, the amount of consumption is going up, the acreage is going way up, like everything is up. The future's looking orange. - And then it just like totally comes apart. - I mean, really, it just falls off a cliff. - Stick a straw in it, it's done. We'll find out what went wrong when we come back. - Saute, you stay, 'cause it's time for some ads. - Welcome back. Let's return now to this orange mystery. Here's where the past can again. - 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. - 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. - Not to step on Alex's metaphor, but I've been thinking of it like murder on the Orient Express with a whole line up of culprits collaborating to do in the Sunshine State's citrus empire. - Not a murderer, but a murderer's row. - The suspects were as follows. Suspect number one is that like Americans just turn against the orange juice. - 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 grower's radar, a different kind of unexpected shock hit the industry. Growing awareness that OJ is an exactly healthy for children. - Most people at Glassforge is made up of six or seven oranges. And there's more sugar 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. The industry does not foresee at all. - 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. - Talk to me about what development and the housing bubble and the years after the housing bubble. What is there a part to play and what's happened to the Florida orange? - Florida obviously had this housing movement 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? - 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. - The Florida real estate sector's thing that kicked that off. - We know that Florida is at the epicenter of this Kelly. - It absolutely is Maggie. Forecasters are predicting another three million foreclosures 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 it's 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. - And so the developers, you know, sort of like re-gather 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 this 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. - Development has been coming for orange groves for a long time. Disney World itself is built on grove land. But surprisingly, it's after the housing boom went bust the development of citrus land, amped up further still. - Everywhere you see a tree is probably a pretty lucrative place to build a house or a condo or a mick mansion, you know, or a trailer park. And once those trees are out, they're not coming back in. - Alex saw all this for himself. When he got a guided tour from an industry veteran named Rick Danzler. Rick was a third generation from Polk County, which is right at the epicenter of 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. - Yeah, like what did you show you? What do you see? - 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 like a public. 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 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 tangelo court and, you know, Folencia acres and citrus place. And it was genuinely really emotional. It was just like this motif of the end was just so in your face. It was like everywhere we turned. - So the crashing of consumer taste for OJ, the development of grove land. 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. 100. for 42 miles per hour. - 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 non-stop activity. There were five major storms that went straight over grove land. 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. - You know, 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 'cause they're so shallow with their roots. The water sitting on top of the sand is really bad for disease and root decay. - And do they spread greening the storms? - Yes, it turns out that those winds, they don't just terrorize the tree. They move the bug around. And of course, the silid does have wings, but it's not a distance fire, 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 silid that 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 a point where we have 100% infection rate. - So now we can get back to greening disease. That little insect, the silid, 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 onto its grove land. 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. - So in the '70s, you had the rise of glyphosate, which is an herbicide that was seemed to be incredibly effective at killing off anything deemed invasive. - Roundup herbicide by Monsanto. There's never been a herbicide like it before. Roundup translocates down and throughout the entire plant. - 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. - So like they, it's basically like starting in the '70s. It's like sand or sandy soil with like orange is growing out. There's no, there's nothing else then, right? - Right, there's nothing else. Yeah, exactly. It's like before there might have been some greenery on the ground or some other crops in her spurs. Now it's just trees and sand. And you're getting that packed super tight and you're getting it for miles and all directions. And for a little while it was working 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. - So basically like without knowing it, like they spend 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 lip. And they're just like kick it, that's what happened. - Yeah, I mean, it's mixing metaphor and the tree had statements that 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 otherwise would have been able to. And that's how you get a total collapse of every growth of every tree. - 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 say 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 is 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 of bricks. - It is an industry on the brink because of a tiny bug threatening to squeeze every drop of life out of it. - So citrus greening, which arrives in like, you know, just to notice around 2006, what are they doing to fix it? Like what do they try? - 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 the 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 hearty and for years, people were like, 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 re-growing it but it doesn't touch the root system which is where the disease actually lives. - Now the cutting edge treatment is to inject trees with oxy tetracycline and antibiotic use 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. - 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 re-infected. 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 when 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. - So you're saying the only orange trees that are likely to survive in Florida are the ones that can have their own private mosquito net? - Yeah, basically, yeah. And they're massive. So it's like a hybrid greenhouse basically. - Under these massive screens, wind speeds drop, rain water is regulated and sunlight is diffused. Without the bacterial infection, that's destroyed so many traditional groves. - It is super expensive but it will produce a fruit and so the reality is that not gonna be zero oranges, there is gonna be an extreme luxury product that is made basically by hobbyists or incidentally in Florida. It's not gonna be Florida citrus industry. There's just no Florida left. (upbeat music) - 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 cereal. - 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 in fact, it was citrus screening 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. - Is there any hope about like are they trying to make like GMO, are they trying to genetically engineer some trees, is that gonna happen? - 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 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 sillets. - 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 the studies. So that's gonna take three to five years minimum, then you have to breed a ton of them, then you have to get people planting them at commercial scale and then you have to wait for those trees to grow oranges. And so one researcher after another said like, it 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 hire me? hold out a decade and a half, if you're already losing money, do 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 time. I would just like, time is up. - 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 for going 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. - 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 this 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. - Did you drink a lot of orange juice working on this piece? (laughing) - You know, I had some. I definitely was much more cognizant of it. - 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. - Yeah, yeah, on the plane back, I was having my minute made orange juice off the drink cart. Yeah, you know, I think I have more of an appreciation for it. It's just a chapter of American history that's, I think, closed probably more quickly than what you expected. - Our thanks to Willip Haskin, 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 Vibecheck 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 Prada Willy Syndrome, a rare genetic disorder that causes insatiable hunger. We talked to two people with a disorder as well as family members to understand what it's like to live with Prada Willy. That's up now. This episode is produced by Katie Shepherd and Evan Chung, Dakota Ring's supervising producer. It was edited by Josh Levine. Dakota Ring is also produced by Willip Haskin and Max Friedman, Marit Jacob is Senior Technical Director. The sportful team includes me, along with Managing Producer, Emma Morgan Stern, and Senior Producer, Andreus O'Hara. Our technical director is, Jared O'Connell. Music held from Black Label Music. The sportful is a production of serious XM podcasts our executive producer is Camille Stanley. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman. And I'm Johanna from Gainesville, Florida, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better. This segment is brought to you by Visit Myrtle Beach. 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 brew master gets down to work and makes all the great booze we sell here. So when you call it title creek brew house, it's not just a cute name. This is actually a brew house. Exactly. 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. Well, this right here is kind of our small batch area where they have new beers come out weekly, and then we have-- Teen beers and siters on tap at title creek. A wide range of styles with rotating seasonal options, plus craft cocktails and beer cocktails, including the Michalada and Alaga Rita, basically a margarita with a couple of glugs of logger. 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 pairs. And then we have some more seating over here. We have our dog runs. It's a very dog friendly place. We have a menu for the dogs they eat now really. Really? What's on that menu? We have a dog bowl which consists of some turkey sausage and white rice, and we have an Argus malt liquor. It's just beef broth with some veggies in it. So they get to come in and eat nice and healthy as well. After getting the tour, I ordered some drinks at the bar and grabbed a table for the pan. 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 hefavitesin. And Jean 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 the soft pretzel with beer cheese. Then I had to try one of their famous burgers. Josh talked me through the options. So our brew master burger is short room and sirloin mix. Cook however you want it, you know? I like my medium rare preferably. And it has our in-house smoked pork on it. And then it also has our pimento cheese, which we make in-house. And we also make the tomato jam in-house. What makes this tomato jam special? It's just some of those green tomatoes that we get. And some nice, plump, Roman 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. That sounds phenomenal. Now you got the classic burger, black and blue with the blue cheese, mushroom, Swiss. But all of you are using short rib and sirloin. So these burgers are not messing around. Not messing around. I don't have enough time to eat all the things I want to eat here. That's why you have to keep coming back. That's right. I went with the first burger Josh talked about. The food is here. This brew master 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. This is at 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. And, Janie, you threw me a curveball at your order. This is a place known for its beer and its burgers. And you ordered? I heard the hummus toast. I love avocado toast. It's a similar type of structure. It's like the toast and there's hummus and cucumbers and a vinaigrette and some greens. It's so good. They make the run hummus here. And I know this might be even better than avocado toast. All right, I'm going to try the hummus toast. That is good. Janie wasn't the only one to put tidal creeks, vegetarian offerings to the test. Emily, you are an aficionado of Caesar salads. How do you rate the Caesar salad? It's very yummy. And I give it a 10 out of 10. Thank you again to the sponsor of today's segment, visit Myrtle Beach. And as I saw a tidal 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 in 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 sea food 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. With 60 miles of beaches, make Myrtle Beach your place by enjoying food you love with people you love. You belong at the beach.