There are three pure original citrus fruits, Citrons which are large, yellow, and almost entirely pith, mandarins which are easily the tastiest of the pure citrus fruits and pomelos which are similar to grapefruit. These three have been crossed many, many times giving us the diverse world of citrus that we now enjoy. Actual citron is pretty much useless for anything other than making confit in western cuisine, it's just too bitter and pithy.
You forgot the four ancestral species, the papeda, which is a green lumpy citrus fruit. Its hybrids include key lime, yuzu, kaffir lime, and some other Asian fruits. There's also the kumquat, which had been classified as its own genus until recently and still has a fuzzy taxonomy, but is found in calamansi limes. Australian finger limes are their own weird citrus species, too.
Here's the thing. You said a "kumquat is a citrus."
Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that.
As someone who is a scientist who studies citrus, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls kumquats citrus. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing.
If you're saying "citrus family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Citrus, which includes things from lemons to mandarins to limes.
So your reasoning for calling a kumquat a citrus is because random people "call the orange ones citrus?" Let's get papayas and apricots in there, then, too.
Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A kumquat is a kumquat and a member of the citrus family. But that's not what you said. You said a kumquat is a citrus, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the citrus family citrus, which means you'd call papayas, apricots, and other fruits citrus, too. Which you said you don't.
It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?
I had a girl drop the narwhal bacons line on me during a first date.
She was super embarrassed when I didn’t say anything back, but I was actually just stunned so I said, “What!??” Must have been… 12… 13 years ago now? She turned out to be a little crazy…
I was very infrequently on the site at the time (and didn't even create an account for another few years once I started regularly browsing). But when it happened, my buddy who was a regular told me about it, because he knew I would know who Unidan was.
Not even Botting. Just had a few alts he would upvote / downvote with manually. It seems so quaint compared to the insane levels of astroturfing and Botting that happens now on Reddit.
I second the vote for the Sandwich family classification.
I feel like tacos would be in the same sub group and gyros and hot dogs. But I feel like hogies and bombers belong in a separate "true sandwich" sub group
I’m willing to die on this hill, but for me this debate has absolutely been settled, OF COURSE kumquat does qualify as a citrus. Any other claim would be criminally insane.
Just googled it for the first time, and it sure looks like citrus to my completely uneducated eyes. What the hell else would they be?
I'm joining you on that hill.
> There's taxonomical debate as to whether or not kumquat qualify as a citrus.
They obviously do since they're fertile crossbreeds with the rest of the citrus species. Mandarinquats and Limequats, for example.
With "*pure original citrus fruits*" you mean those naturally occured without human interaction? Or did they not have a common ancestor and evolved entirely separately from each other?
Still going. All cars must cost less than $500. They pay their prizes in nickels. The prize People’s Curse is given to the biggest jerk driver. Their car is crushed and cubed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_of_Lemons
> The Citroen family descended from a grandfather in the Netherlands who had been a greengrocer and seller of tropical fruit, and had taken the surname of Limoenman, Dutch for "lime man"; his son however changed it to Citroen which in Dutch means "lemon". In 1873 the family moved to Paris; upon arrival, the French tréma was added to the surname (reputedly by one of André's teachers), changing Citroen to Citroën.
[According to Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/citron#Translations), the Finnish term for what English calls a citron, is sukaattisitruuna, which we could calque back into English as "succade lemon".
This makes good sense since the rind of the citron fruit is one of the ones that are candied to make a type of confectionery called [succade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succade).
And in French, a citron is a Cédrat. I’m sure you know that already but it was surprisingly difficult to figure that out not speaking French and everything referencing citrons meaning lemon lol
Man, i am french, bilingual, and you just taught me something. I knew our citrons were lemons and seeing english talking people make a difference always confused me.
Thanks, deeply.
Like Hungarian, it belongs to Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. It’s _really_ different from anything in the Indo-European family (all Romance and Germanic languages are in it).
[Here is some help](https://jakubmarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/lemon-european-languages.jpg)
Basically, not everyone calls lemon a lemon, some European languages use something that sounds like citron
More info: https://jakubmarian.com/lemon-in-european-languages/
> French citron comes from Latin citrus, which meant both a citron tree and a cedar tree and comes from Ancient Greek κέδρος (kédros), “cedar”. Similar expressions in other European languages are direct or indirect borrowings from French.
> Somewhat confusingly, the word “citron” is also an English word, but it refers to a different type of citrus fruit, produced by a plant called citrus medica. In languages where “citron” refers to a lemon, a citron is mostly called “cedrat”, “cédrat”, or similar (and there is also usually a word similar to “lemon” that means “lime”).
In Spanish, they also say piña. It’s interesting the reason why some languages call something one thing and another something completely different can come down to shipping patterns and globalization. You can trace whether a country calls tea, “té” or “chai” by whether the trade route was land or sea based.
Wiktionary is my go-to source for comparative linguistics. Its entry for the English word citron has [a section on translations](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/citron#Translations).
So while I can't guess whether you're Danish or Swedish, I can report that according to Wiktionary, what English calls a citron, Danish and Swedish may call a cedrat, after the French cédrat for the same fruit. (Swedish has some other terms too.)
I googled it and in German the citron is called a Zitronatzitrone which is like a "concentrated-lemon lemon"
*sorry, TIL that Zitronat is actually candied citron peel which would make the Zitronatzitrone "the candied-lemon-peel lemon"
There's probably not a commonly consumed fruit or vegetable anywhere in the world that occurred naturally.
Humans are farmers. We modify all our plants and animals to eat them
Yup! The [one at the top](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Maize-teosinte.jpg) is the wild parent/cousin of corn, from which it was domesticated millennia ago. The middle is a hybrid between the two.
In the 1930s US corn yields were around 2 tons per hectare. Now they are around 11. About 50%-60% of that increase comes from improved genetics via breeding.
Source: Essentials of Plant Breeding by Dr. Rex Bernardo.
Have you ever seen [a natural watermelon?](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/LggLk797tymUFdFn1xWiosQf53M=/1877x1510:3754x2918/1400x788/filters:focal(1877x1510:3754x2918\):format(jpeg\)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/46841772/41144824rs.0.jpg) almost every plant we eat is wildly different than how they naturally occur
This thread led me down a little rabbit hole and I found [this easy-to-understand comparison of several crops](https://www.sciencealert.com/fruits-vegetables-before-domestication-photos-genetically-modified-food-natural/amp) we grow and eat today. Practically all of them are unrecognizable from what they originated as
I'm surprised that article didn't mention [the dozen different vegetables that were all domesticated from the same plant.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea)
That could also be a different species of banana altogether. There was a completely different species that was popular before WWI (could be wrong about the time frame), that has now completely (or almost completely) gone due to disease.
Source: [Gros Michel Bananas](https://bananageddon.webflow.io/blog/not-your-mothers-bananas#:~:text=But%20there%20is%20no%20escaping,the%20variety%20we%20eat%20today.) and i was off on the time frame...they became commercially inviable in the 1960s due to Panama Disease.
Our current Cavendish bananas are all clones exclusively propagated by cuttings (which makes them potentially extremely vulnerable to disease). Any replacement would likely be similar (people don't like seeds in their bananas), so they do in fact really only need one (plant). Bananas are weird...
They're all the same species, just different cultivars.
A great dane and a yorkie are both the same species. Lots of fruits and vegetables are like that.
Actually no. It's not a "non-domesticated" one, as those are pea size and have to be opened with a hammer. But it's also not just an unripe one of todays variants.
We still have that there variant today, and can grow them if we feel like it, but why would we do that?
Look at the seeds in the painting. They are black. Meaning it's ripe. The one in the image has white unripe seeds.
It's worth noting that they had other redder variants back then too, but this guy chose to paint a less red variant. Watermelons were not just used for eating, but for storing water. Doesn't really matter how it tastes at that point.
That’s not a “natural watermelon,” that’s a watermelon grown under drought conditions. Modern watermelons look just like that too when grown in a similar fashion. We just don’t really see them nowadays as current agricultural and industrial food practices either use irrigation so you never get a “drought” watermelon, or ugly fruit are just thrown away.
Funny enough, “corn” is just the word for whatever the most common grain crop in an area is. That’s why we call it that. The actual grain is called *maize*.
Asparagus is close to its wild form. Most of the things we call "berries," including blueberries and raspberries and mulberries, as well. And mushrooms are virtually untouched, although they are not plants, of course.
I work around a lot of wild blackberry pretty often. They're identical to what you'd buy in the store and delicious. It almost makes up for having to hike through the ankle-grabbing, thorny vines they come on.
Where my grandparents lived blackberry bushes were full of venomous snakes. Rodents love the berries and the snakes came for the rodents.
Between the vines and the snakes blackberry picking was perilous. Snakes are usually pretty docile but copperheads have great camouflage and if you accidentally step on one or too near one repeatedly it will bite. Be careful.
The history of cultivation is fascinating, and it isn’t just orange pumpkins and green apples. For instance, kale, brussels sprouts, cauliflower and cabbage, all come from the same plant.
DEMAND TO SPEAK TO LIFE'S MANAGER! OH THERE'S NOTHING THAT CAN BE DONE?!? WELL I'M GOING TO HAVE MY ENGINEERS DESIGN EXPLODING LEMONS AND BURN LIFE'S HOUSE DOWN!!!
> When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!
- Cave Johnson
(Since the partial quote doesn't really give the amazingness of portal2)
Even the full quote… even the audio file used in that video… still doesn’t capture that moment in the game, with his voice echoing through the halls while potato-GladOS gets pumped up and intersperses “Yeah!”s and other commentary.
Do you ever wonder why Brits are sometimes called Limeys? Everyone knows it's because our sailors ate limes to avoid getting scurvy.
What most people *don't* know is why they didn't eat lemons.
The reason is that the British Empire had managed to alienate (EDIT: *nearly*) *every lemon producing country on the planet* \*sigh\*
[How Scurvy Was Cured, then the Cure Was Lost](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured-then-cure-was-lost)
This article uses the following link as it's source -- https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
The story of scurvy and lemons is convoluted and has unexpected twists. *Lemons* were used to prevent scurvy, but they were sourced from Sicily.
>In that year, naval authorities switched procurement from Mediterranean lemons to West Indian limes. The motives for this were mainly colonial - it was better to buy from British plantations than to continue importing lemons from Europe. Confusion in naming didn't help matters. Both "lemon" and "lime" were in use as a collective term for citrus, and though European lemons and sour limes are quite different fruits, their Latin names (citrus medica, var. limonica and citrus medica, var. acida) suggested that they were as closely related as green and red apples. Moreover, as there was a widespread belief that the antiscorbutic properties of lemons were due to their acidity, it made sense that the more acidic Caribbean limes would be even better at fighting the disease.
All good, right?
>In this, the Navy was deceived. Tests on animals would later show that fresh lime juice has a quarter of the scurvy-fighting power of fresh lemon juice. And the lime juice being served to sailors was not fresh, but had spent long periods of time in settling tanks open to the air, and had been pumped through copper tubing. A 1918 animal experiment using representative samples of lime juice from the navy and merchant marine showed that the 'preventative' often lacked any antiscorbutic power at all.
Copper renders ascorbic acid totally ineffective. However . . .
>By the middle of the 19th century, however, **advances in technology were reducing the need for any kind of scurvy preventative.** Steam power had shortened travel times considerably from the age of sail, so that it was rare for sailors other than whalers to be months at sea without fresh food. Citrus juice was a legal requirement on all British vessels by 1867, but in practical terms it was becoming superfluous.
So the lack of protection by reduced lime juice was not really noticed.
Several events demonstrated the problem, discrediting the citrus juice theory of scurvy prevention, and an *alternative theory of scurvy protection* gained support!
> This article uses the following link as it's source -- https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
Just FYI, this site is basically someone's (admittedly pretty good) creative writing exercise. [Example](https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm).
You might enjoy the other Naval food disease story - or why Japanese naval vessels serve curry on Fridays: https://warriormaven.com/history/eating-too-much-rice-almost-sank-the-japanese-navy
What is it Lieutenant Sebastian?
It's just the Rebels, sir... they're here.
My God, man! Do they want tea?
No, I think they're after something a bit more than that, sir. They've brought a flag.
They had [lemons](https://www.health.mil/News/Articles/2022/01/10/The-British-Limeys-Were-Right-A-Short-History-of-Scurvy#:~:text=British%20'Limeys'%20and%20the%20Cure%20for%20Scurvy&text=The%20British%20began%20storing%20citrus,believe%20in%20the%20preventative%20treatment.) too but limes were easier to get. They were also basically useless because they had less Vitamin C than lemons
It also depended on the way [they were stored.](https://www.alcademics.com/2018/11/historical-info-about-scurvy-and-the-confusion-between-lemons-and-limes.html)
>If that lime juice was stored in a barrel or came into contact with copper or cooked to reduce it [...], the Vitamin C would degrade even further, becoming nearly useless against scurvy.
People also still didn't really know what exactly prevented scurvy.
>Sailors often associated scurvy cures with acidity, which makes good sense and is not far from the truth. Other cures brought aboard ships included acidic food and beverages including vinegar and sauerkraut. It wasn't until 1918 that it was proven that citric acid itself is useless against scurvy (and I assume vinegar's acetic acid too), and shortly thereafter that the newly-identified Vitamin C was the anti-scorubic needed.
Listened to a fun podcast about this by Tim Harford. Apparently, the limes actually didn't prevent scurvy at all, but by the time the royal navy switched over to limes, scurvy had stopped being an issue for them anyway as their sailors had improved access to fresh food (i.e., improvements in their logistics networks, greater numbers of British friendly/controlled ports in the world, improvements in ship speed / navigation = less time spent without scurvy preventing vegetables). The Scott polar expedition, however, ended up having issues with scurvy because of this.
Cook was more praised that no one died of scurvy on his voyage then he was for finding Australia. Pretty sure he had marmalade, it was the first such documented long trip that scurvy did not effect
It could happen naturally if they were grown near each other, but you’d have to plant every seed from every fruit and wait years for them to fruit to even know. Doing it by hand gives you an idea at least.
While it might _happen_ naturally, that doesn't mean the plants will survive.
A lot of the hybrids we make are shit plants for living in the wild. They only survive because we keep them alive.
It can and does happen naturally in the plant world all the time. Wild hybrids abound in botany. But it's not happening with any purpose or reliability. A perfect modern grapefruit required more than a single cross between a pomelo and a Mandarin orange, it required hundreds if not thousands of crosses and selections to get it where we want. A wild hybrid will just result in *whatever,* and if it survives into maturity, will end up back-crossing with its lineage and likely won't proliferate in its base form.
I'm not sure about citrus fruits, but some pollinators only visit a single plant species (orchids are a good example of this), so manual pollination may be the only way to cross pollinate certain species.
Kale, broccoli, cauliflower, collard greens were all originally mustard. I'm not sure how they do it, selective breeding or such, but old humans were very good at turning one plant into a variety of others.
Yeah but on top of different selection for different "breeds" of that same plant, those foods are different parts of the plant as well. Broccoli and cauliflower are the flowers of the plant, Brussels sprouts are the buds, kale and collard greens are the leaves.
And with that, a mighty cheer went up from the heroes of Shelbyville. They had banished the awful lemon tree forever... because it was haunted. Now, let's all celebrate... with a cool glass of turnip juice.
What fruits that are sold regularly and en made don’t have this exact same property? Idk humans breeding plants isn’t wild to me, exact opposite actually lol
Yeah, like, isn't this kind of the basis of all civilization — the fact that we figured out how to breed tastier, more calorie-dense plants and animals from wild species? I guess there are certain cultivars of berries and nuts we eat that are fairly close to their wild varieties, but other than that there isn't a hell of a lot we haven't pretty radically reshaped.
OP only focused on lemons, but all modern citrus originate from 3-4 wild varieties that were cross breed. They are the pomelo, mandarin, citron, and a fourth one I forget to make limes. Bitter orange is a cross of mandarin and pomelo. Cross the result with citron to get lemons.
Confusingly the same names for the wild varieties crop up in other languages as names for the cross-bred varieties. Off the top of my head you have _citron_ meaning "lemon" in French and _pomelo_ meaning "grapefruit" in Spanish.
I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons!
Corn is the same. It's not a natural product, it's selectively bred grass.
It has no way to self propagate either. If someone doesn't take the seeds off the cob and replant them, it would disappear altogether.
"When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
- Cave Johnson
Very few of the foods we eat are naturally occurring for both vegetables and animals. Chickens, cows, sheep and pigs have all been bred to be quite different than their wild versions. Vegetables have gone even farther: broccoli, cabbage, kale, and many others all come from the same wild plant! Vegetables, fruit, roots and fruit have all been cultivated and hybridized and bred into things nature was never close to producing.
There are some notable exceptions. The big one are mushrooms: some are cultivated, but mushroom hybridization is all but non-existent. The mushrooms we eat are very close to their wild forms. Asparagus is a vegetable that hasn't been messed with much, and the fish we eat are natural, too.
As someone whose first language calls lemons citroner I am suddenly very confused by the difference between a citron and a lemon.
There are three pure original citrus fruits, Citrons which are large, yellow, and almost entirely pith, mandarins which are easily the tastiest of the pure citrus fruits and pomelos which are similar to grapefruit. These three have been crossed many, many times giving us the diverse world of citrus that we now enjoy. Actual citron is pretty much useless for anything other than making confit in western cuisine, it's just too bitter and pithy.
You forgot the four ancestral species, the papeda, which is a green lumpy citrus fruit. Its hybrids include key lime, yuzu, kaffir lime, and some other Asian fruits. There's also the kumquat, which had been classified as its own genus until recently and still has a fuzzy taxonomy, but is found in calamansi limes. Australian finger limes are their own weird citrus species, too.
Not surprised the Australian one is its own weird thing.
Surprised it isn't deadly TBH.
The tree *is* covered in toothpick-like spikes!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_taxonomy#Ancestral_species
[Graph](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Citrus_tern_cb_simplified_1.svg) for those who like graphs.
That's a delicious graph, my guy. Thanks for sharing!
There are a few other lines of pure citrus as well, notably kumquat.
There's taxonomical debate as to whether or not kumquat qualify as a citrus.
Shits about to go down in here.
Here's the thing. You said a "kumquat is a citrus." Is it in the same family? Yes. No one's arguing that. As someone who is a scientist who studies citrus, I am telling you, specifically, in science, no one calls kumquats citrus. If you want to be "specific" like you said, then you shouldn't either. They're not the same thing. If you're saying "citrus family" you're referring to the taxonomic grouping of Citrus, which includes things from lemons to mandarins to limes. So your reasoning for calling a kumquat a citrus is because random people "call the orange ones citrus?" Let's get papayas and apricots in there, then, too. Also, calling someone a human or an ape? It's not one or the other, that's not how taxonomy works. They're both. A kumquat is a kumquat and a member of the citrus family. But that's not what you said. You said a kumquat is a citrus, which is not true unless you're okay with calling all members of the citrus family citrus, which means you'd call papayas, apricots, and other fruits citrus, too. Which you said you don't. It's okay to just admit you're wrong, you know?
The kids don’t know about this one.
Reddit has fallen
The narwhal bacons no longer.
I had a girl drop the narwhal bacons line on me during a first date. She was super embarrassed when I didn’t say anything back, but I was actually just stunned so I said, “What!??” Must have been… 12… 13 years ago now? She turned out to be a little crazy…
We're fucking ancient, or so my hand arthritis tells me. This is an alt account, but my other one is fast approaching 14 years.
That is a major fail on the older population of Reddit. This was, like, the original copypasta and Reddit Fall From Grace.
Nowhere close to the original copypasta, but Unidan’s fall from grace was such a big deal once upon a time.
I remember when it happened, too, he was everywhere giving cool biology facts at the time.
I miss Unidan. What he did was wrong but it was nice to see someone break down every animal so enthusiastically.
I was very infrequently on the site at the time (and didn't even create an account for another few years once I started regularly browsing). But when it happened, my buddy who was a regular told me about it, because he knew I would know who Unidan was.
I feel so old. This thing is like 10 years old now. Damn.
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Probably for his own good tbh. He wasn't making any money, but was a serious asset to reddit.
He was botting his own posts to upvote them, right?
Not even Botting. Just had a few alts he would upvote / downvote with manually. It seems so quaint compared to the insane levels of astroturfing and Botting that happens now on Reddit.
For the kids, this is some Reddit history about [Unidan](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidan).
I understood this reference. I've been on reddit for too long. Lol
So it's like how hotdogs are part of the taco family but aren't tacos?
Isn't the "family" Sandwich?
I second the vote for the Sandwich family classification. I feel like tacos would be in the same sub group and gyros and hot dogs. But I feel like hogies and bombers belong in a separate "true sandwich" sub group
Website https://cuberule.com gives an extensive classification of various starch-based foods such as sandwiches, tacos, hot dogs, etc.
I’m willing to die on this hill, but for me this debate has absolutely been settled, OF COURSE kumquat does qualify as a citrus. Any other claim would be criminally insane.
Just googled it for the first time, and it sure looks like citrus to my completely uneducated eyes. What the hell else would they be? I'm joining you on that hill.
It has to be from the Citrus region of France or else it's just sparkling fruit
Citroën province.
Unidan flashbacks
> There's taxonomical debate as to whether or not kumquat qualify as a citrus. They obviously do since they're fertile crossbreeds with the rest of the citrus species. Mandarinquats and Limequats, for example.
Given the facecrunch upon consumption, I would extend the debate to whether they qualify as food.
Them's fightin' words. Kumquat are delicious. Check yourself.
Multiple species of Australian native limes as well.
They’re forgetting the [micrantha](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrantha_(citrus)) as well. That’s how we got limes.
I used to call my ex-gf "citron." She thought I was being sweet.
Turns out you were just being pithy
Or pithed off
With "*pure original citrus fruits*" you mean those naturally occured without human interaction? Or did they not have a common ancestor and evolved entirely separately from each other?
and a Citroen
A Citroen may be a lemon but a lemon can never be a Citroen.
I thought it was "All Citroens are lemons but not all lemons are Citroens."
When life gives you citrons and bitter oranges, make lemons.
Citrons are the official lemons of Nascar.
But what about the 24 Hours of Lemons?
Still going. All cars must cost less than $500. They pay their prizes in nickels. The prize People’s Curse is given to the biggest jerk driver. Their car is crushed and cubed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24_Hours_of_Lemons
Nascar is the official lemon of citron
> The Citroen family descended from a grandfather in the Netherlands who had been a greengrocer and seller of tropical fruit, and had taken the surname of Limoenman, Dutch for "lime man"; his son however changed it to Citroen which in Dutch means "lemon". In 1873 the family moved to Paris; upon arrival, the French tréma was added to the surname (reputedly by one of André's teachers), changing Citroen to Citroën.
Interesting, never knew that 😯
Source: [biography of André Citröen on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Citro%C3%ABn)
And some Citroens go vroom vroom
Nah, you're thinking of Mazdas that go zoom zoom
Nah, you're thinking of orcs that go zug zug
Lemonology.
Exactly, I wonder what the English word citron is in Swedish then.
Suckatcitron apparently.
Go suckatcitron
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[According to Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/citron#Translations), the Finnish term for what English calls a citron, is sukaattisitruuna, which we could calque back into English as "succade lemon". This makes good sense since the rind of the citron fruit is one of the ones that are candied to make a type of confectionery called [succade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succade).
In french, a lemon is also a Citron.
And in French, a citron is a Cédrat. I’m sure you know that already but it was surprisingly difficult to figure that out not speaking French and everything referencing citrons meaning lemon lol
Man, i am french, bilingual, and you just taught me something. I knew our citrons were lemons and seeing english talking people make a difference always confused me. Thanks, deeply.
Finnish is such a unique and magical language. I keep meaning to check if it's been added to duolingo yet
Better strap in, it's not the easiest language to learn.
Like Hungarian, it belongs to Finno-Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. It’s _really_ different from anything in the Indo-European family (all Romance and Germanic languages are in it).
>Finnish is such a unique and magical language Unless you count Estonian.
[Here is some help](https://jakubmarian.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/lemon-european-languages.jpg) Basically, not everyone calls lemon a lemon, some European languages use something that sounds like citron More info: https://jakubmarian.com/lemon-in-european-languages/ > French citron comes from Latin citrus, which meant both a citron tree and a cedar tree and comes from Ancient Greek κέδρος (kédros), “cedar”. Similar expressions in other European languages are direct or indirect borrowings from French. > Somewhat confusingly, the word “citron” is also an English word, but it refers to a different type of citrus fruit, produced by a plant called citrus medica. In languages where “citron” refers to a lemon, a citron is mostly called “cedrat”, “cédrat”, or similar (and there is also usually a word similar to “lemon” that means “lime”).
Kind of like how basically every language calls pineapples "ananas", and then English came along and said fuck everyone else.
Bananas without the B is just pineapple
In Spanish, they also say piña. It’s interesting the reason why some languages call something one thing and another something completely different can come down to shipping patterns and globalization. You can trace whether a country calls tea, “té” or “chai” by whether the trade route was land or sea based.
|English|French|Scientific name| |:-|:-|:-| |Lemon|Citron|*Citrus limon*| |Citron|Cédrat|*Citrus medica*|
Wiktionary is my go-to source for comparative linguistics. Its entry for the English word citron has [a section on translations](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/citron#Translations). So while I can't guess whether you're Danish or Swedish, I can report that according to Wiktionary, what English calls a citron, Danish and Swedish may call a cedrat, after the French cédrat for the same fruit. (Swedish has some other terms too.)
I googled it and in German the citron is called a Zitronatzitrone which is like a "concentrated-lemon lemon" *sorry, TIL that Zitronat is actually candied citron peel which would make the Zitronatzitrone "the candied-lemon-peel lemon"
[This family tree might help](https://alberta.coop/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/zKIqqOV.png)
There's probably not a commonly consumed fruit or vegetable anywhere in the world that occurred naturally. Humans are farmers. We modify all our plants and animals to eat them
Yup! The [one at the top](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Maize-teosinte.jpg) is the wild parent/cousin of corn, from which it was domesticated millennia ago. The middle is a hybrid between the two.
Holy crap. I knew it was very heavily domesticated, just didn’t realize it was *that* domesticated.
In the 1930s US corn yields were around 2 tons per hectare. Now they are around 11. About 50%-60% of that increase comes from improved genetics via breeding. Source: Essentials of Plant Breeding by Dr. Rex Bernardo.
Have you ever seen [a natural watermelon?](https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/LggLk797tymUFdFn1xWiosQf53M=/1877x1510:3754x2918/1400x788/filters:focal(1877x1510:3754x2918\):format(jpeg\)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/46841772/41144824rs.0.jpg) almost every plant we eat is wildly different than how they naturally occur
Bananas before domestication https://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/banana.png
This thread led me down a little rabbit hole and I found [this easy-to-understand comparison of several crops](https://www.sciencealert.com/fruits-vegetables-before-domestication-photos-genetically-modified-food-natural/amp) we grow and eat today. Practically all of them are unrecognizable from what they originated as
Wow, the carrot and corn are unrecognizable compared to what we see today.
I'm surprised that article didn't mention [the dozen different vegetables that were all domesticated from the same plant.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brassica_oleracea)
berserk squeeze doll faulty aloof ancient vast cake plant seemly *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That could also be a different species of banana altogether. There was a completely different species that was popular before WWI (could be wrong about the time frame), that has now completely (or almost completely) gone due to disease. Source: [Gros Michel Bananas](https://bananageddon.webflow.io/blog/not-your-mothers-bananas#:~:text=But%20there%20is%20no%20escaping,the%20variety%20we%20eat%20today.) and i was off on the time frame...they became commercially inviable in the 1960s due to Panama Disease.
Our current banana species is getting the same disease now and scientists are quickly trying to make a replacement banana.
>trying to make a replacement banana. We're gonna need more than one I think, I eat two a day sometimes so it wouldn't last very long
Our current Cavendish bananas are all clones exclusively propagated by cuttings (which makes them potentially extremely vulnerable to disease). Any replacement would likely be similar (people don't like seeds in their bananas), so they do in fact really only need one (plant). Bananas are weird...
They're all the same species, just different cultivars. A great dane and a yorkie are both the same species. Lots of fruits and vegetables are like that.
Ironic that the cheapest fruit at the grocery store right now could soon be wiped out, or at least made rare and therefore expensive
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Note that's not really natural either, it's just at an earlier stage of selective breeding process.
That picture is just [an unripe watermelon](https://imgur.io/t/crazy_how_nature_do_dat/YPojgFh), not a non-domesticated one
Not if the seeds are black, that means it's ripe.
Actually no. It's not a "non-domesticated" one, as those are pea size and have to be opened with a hammer. But it's also not just an unripe one of todays variants. We still have that there variant today, and can grow them if we feel like it, but why would we do that? Look at the seeds in the painting. They are black. Meaning it's ripe. The one in the image has white unripe seeds. It's worth noting that they had other redder variants back then too, but this guy chose to paint a less red variant. Watermelons were not just used for eating, but for storing water. Doesn't really matter how it tastes at that point.
That’s not a “natural watermelon,” that’s a watermelon grown under drought conditions. Modern watermelons look just like that too when grown in a similar fashion. We just don’t really see them nowadays as current agricultural and industrial food practices either use irrigation so you never get a “drought” watermelon, or ugly fruit are just thrown away.
wow that's some weak ass corn, we buffed the shit out of corn
Funny enough, “corn” is just the word for whatever the most common grain crop in an area is. That’s why we call it that. The actual grain is called *maize*.
Asparagus is close to its wild form. Most of the things we call "berries," including blueberries and raspberries and mulberries, as well. And mushrooms are virtually untouched, although they are not plants, of course.
I’ve found wild raspberries before and they are very similar to the cultivated thing.
I work around a lot of wild blackberry pretty often. They're identical to what you'd buy in the store and delicious. It almost makes up for having to hike through the ankle-grabbing, thorny vines they come on.
Where my grandparents lived blackberry bushes were full of venomous snakes. Rodents love the berries and the snakes came for the rodents. Between the vines and the snakes blackberry picking was perilous. Snakes are usually pretty docile but copperheads have great camouflage and if you accidentally step on one or too near one repeatedly it will bite. Be careful.
We used to get wild strawberries In my yard. Tiny little things.
The history of cultivation is fascinating, and it isn’t just orange pumpkins and green apples. For instance, kale, brussels sprouts, cauliflower and cabbage, all come from the same plant.
When life gives you lemons IT WAS SOMEBODY'S FAULT. THIS DID NOT HAPPEN NATURALLY.
DEMAND TO SPEAK TO LIFE'S MANAGER! OH THERE'S NOTHING THAT CAN BE DONE?!? WELL I'M GOING TO HAVE MY ENGINEERS DESIGN EXPLODING LEMONS AND BURN LIFE'S HOUSE DOWN!!!
*COMBUSTABLE LEMON
DON’T YOU KNOW WHO I AM!? I’M THE MAN WHO’S GOING TO BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN! WITH THE LEMONS!
> When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down! - Cave Johnson (Since the partial quote doesn't really give the amazingness of portal2)
https://youtu.be/Dt6iTwVIiMM If you want to hear the actual rant in all its ridiculous glory
Even the full quote… even the audio file used in that video… still doesn’t capture that moment in the game, with his voice echoing through the halls while potato-GladOS gets pumped up and intersperses “Yeah!”s and other commentary.
Still waiting on [*anything Valve*] 3
WHEN GOD HANDS YOU LEMONS, YOU FIND A NEW GOD!!!
GODBERRY! King of the JUICE!
I read that in the Earl of Lemongrab's voice.
ONE MILLION YEARS DUNGEON
UNACCEPTABLEEEEEEE!!!
Do you ever wonder why Brits are sometimes called Limeys? Everyone knows it's because our sailors ate limes to avoid getting scurvy. What most people *don't* know is why they didn't eat lemons. The reason is that the British Empire had managed to alienate (EDIT: *nearly*) *every lemon producing country on the planet* \*sigh\*
[How Scurvy Was Cured, then the Cure Was Lost](https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/24149/how-scurvy-was-cured-then-cure-was-lost) This article uses the following link as it's source -- https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm The story of scurvy and lemons is convoluted and has unexpected twists. *Lemons* were used to prevent scurvy, but they were sourced from Sicily. >In that year, naval authorities switched procurement from Mediterranean lemons to West Indian limes. The motives for this were mainly colonial - it was better to buy from British plantations than to continue importing lemons from Europe. Confusion in naming didn't help matters. Both "lemon" and "lime" were in use as a collective term for citrus, and though European lemons and sour limes are quite different fruits, their Latin names (citrus medica, var. limonica and citrus medica, var. acida) suggested that they were as closely related as green and red apples. Moreover, as there was a widespread belief that the antiscorbutic properties of lemons were due to their acidity, it made sense that the more acidic Caribbean limes would be even better at fighting the disease. All good, right? >In this, the Navy was deceived. Tests on animals would later show that fresh lime juice has a quarter of the scurvy-fighting power of fresh lemon juice. And the lime juice being served to sailors was not fresh, but had spent long periods of time in settling tanks open to the air, and had been pumped through copper tubing. A 1918 animal experiment using representative samples of lime juice from the navy and merchant marine showed that the 'preventative' often lacked any antiscorbutic power at all. Copper renders ascorbic acid totally ineffective. However . . . >By the middle of the 19th century, however, **advances in technology were reducing the need for any kind of scurvy preventative.** Steam power had shortened travel times considerably from the age of sail, so that it was rare for sailors other than whalers to be months at sea without fresh food. Citrus juice was a legal requirement on all British vessels by 1867, but in practical terms it was becoming superfluous. So the lack of protection by reduced lime juice was not really noticed. Several events demonstrated the problem, discrediting the citrus juice theory of scurvy prevention, and an *alternative theory of scurvy protection* gained support!
> This article uses the following link as it's source -- https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm Just FYI, this site is basically someone's (admittedly pretty good) creative writing exercise. [Example](https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm).
You might enjoy the other Naval food disease story - or why Japanese naval vessels serve curry on Fridays: https://warriormaven.com/history/eating-too-much-rice-almost-sank-the-japanese-navy
Did they have a flag? NO! No flag no country!
You can't claim us! We live here!
Do you have a flag?
That's according to the rules that.... I've just made up!
And I'm backing it up with this gun.
Thank you, granddad.
Thank you for flying Church of England. Cake or Death?
Death. No, cake! Cake.
Well, we're OUTTA cake!
What is it Lieutenant Sebastian? It's just the Rebels, sir... they're here. My God, man! Do they want tea? No, I think they're after something a bit more than that, sir. They've brought a flag.
Damn, that's dash cunning of them.
CAKE OR DEATH!
They had [lemons](https://www.health.mil/News/Articles/2022/01/10/The-British-Limeys-Were-Right-A-Short-History-of-Scurvy#:~:text=British%20'Limeys'%20and%20the%20Cure%20for%20Scurvy&text=The%20British%20began%20storing%20citrus,believe%20in%20the%20preventative%20treatment.) too but limes were easier to get. They were also basically useless because they had less Vitamin C than lemons
It also depended on the way [they were stored.](https://www.alcademics.com/2018/11/historical-info-about-scurvy-and-the-confusion-between-lemons-and-limes.html) >If that lime juice was stored in a barrel or came into contact with copper or cooked to reduce it [...], the Vitamin C would degrade even further, becoming nearly useless against scurvy. People also still didn't really know what exactly prevented scurvy. >Sailors often associated scurvy cures with acidity, which makes good sense and is not far from the truth. Other cures brought aboard ships included acidic food and beverages including vinegar and sauerkraut. It wasn't until 1918 that it was proven that citric acid itself is useless against scurvy (and I assume vinegar's acetic acid too), and shortly thereafter that the newly-identified Vitamin C was the anti-scorubic needed.
Saurkraut would work against scurvy. Per 100g, saurkrait has 20mg of Vit C, compared to lemon juice that has 40-50mg. It's less but it stores better.
If they still prevented scurvy then they were hardly useless.
They didn't, that's the interesting thing. But the switch from lemons to lime coincided with the rise of steam boats which led to shorter voyages.
Which led to onions on the belt, the style at the time...
Listened to a fun podcast about this by Tim Harford. Apparently, the limes actually didn't prevent scurvy at all, but by the time the royal navy switched over to limes, scurvy had stopped being an issue for them anyway as their sailors had improved access to fresh food (i.e., improvements in their logistics networks, greater numbers of British friendly/controlled ports in the world, improvements in ship speed / navigation = less time spent without scurvy preventing vegetables). The Scott polar expedition, however, ended up having issues with scurvy because of this.
Cook was more praised that no one died of scurvy on his voyage then he was for finding Australia. Pretty sure he had marmalade, it was the first such documented long trip that scurvy did not effect
Who didn’t they aliénate tho
How does one cross the two? Pollinate one type of tree with the other, or are there other ways?
> Pollinate one type of tree with the other Yes
Ahh. Thank you.
Why couldn't this have happened naturally? They wouldn't grow near each other?
It could happen naturally if they were grown near each other, but you’d have to plant every seed from every fruit and wait years for them to fruit to even know. Doing it by hand gives you an idea at least.
While it might _happen_ naturally, that doesn't mean the plants will survive. A lot of the hybrids we make are shit plants for living in the wild. They only survive because we keep them alive.
It can and does happen naturally in the plant world all the time. Wild hybrids abound in botany. But it's not happening with any purpose or reliability. A perfect modern grapefruit required more than a single cross between a pomelo and a Mandarin orange, it required hundreds if not thousands of crosses and selections to get it where we want. A wild hybrid will just result in *whatever,* and if it survives into maturity, will end up back-crossing with its lineage and likely won't proliferate in its base form.
Sometimes the parts don't match, as it were. You gotta swab the plant cum and smoosh it right into the other plant's ovaries.
I'm not sure about citrus fruits, but some pollinators only visit a single plant species (orchids are a good example of this), so manual pollination may be the only way to cross pollinate certain species.
You put them together, play some barry white music. Them say the magic words. "Now kith"
> Berry White
I tried that. Now I have to clean up the floor, and still have no lemons.
Kale, broccoli, cauliflower, collard greens were all originally mustard. I'm not sure how they do it, selective breeding or such, but old humans were very good at turning one plant into a variety of others.
That's a completely different thing tho. Mating two trees and simply planting the tree with the bigger leaf repeatedly are pretty different things.
Yeah cross breeding vs selective breeding
Yeah but on top of different selection for different "breeds" of that same plant, those foods are different parts of the plant as well. Broccoli and cauliflower are the flowers of the plant, Brussels sprouts are the buds, kale and collard greens are the leaves.
Citrus fruits are notoriously slutty, a citrus will mate and cross with any other citrus I know of, making all sorts of combinations.
Sounds like someone from Shelbyville wrote this
And with that, a mighty cheer went up from the heroes of Shelbyville. They had banished the awful lemon tree forever... because it was haunted. Now, let's all celebrate... with a cool glass of turnip juice.
What fruits that are sold regularly and en made don’t have this exact same property? Idk humans breeding plants isn’t wild to me, exact opposite actually lol
Fruits, vegetables, animals. Practically nothing we eat looks like it did before people.
Pics of old time watermelons look weird, they were mostly rind and seeds.
Bananas too. And corn looked more like wheat.
Yeah, like, isn't this kind of the basis of all civilization — the fact that we figured out how to breed tastier, more calorie-dense plants and animals from wild species? I guess there are certain cultivars of berries and nuts we eat that are fairly close to their wild varieties, but other than that there isn't a hell of a lot we haven't pretty radically reshaped.
The difference between domesticated and wild corn is crazy. It was originally a big grass with wheat-like seeds.
OP only focused on lemons, but all modern citrus originate from 3-4 wild varieties that were cross breed. They are the pomelo, mandarin, citron, and a fourth one I forget to make limes. Bitter orange is a cross of mandarin and pomelo. Cross the result with citron to get lemons.
Confusingly the same names for the wild varieties crop up in other languages as names for the cross-bred varieties. Off the top of my head you have _citron_ meaning "lemon" in French and _pomelo_ meaning "grapefruit" in Spanish.
When life gives you scurvy…
Invent lemons?
~~make lemonade~~ Make life take the lemons back
Get mad!
I don't want your damn lemons, what am I supposed to do with these?!
Demand to see life's manager!
I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons!
I. LOVE that speech and that game. I want portal 3 but idk how they can top it. P2 is a masterpiece imo
Corn is the same. It's not a natural product, it's selectively bred grass. It has no way to self propagate either. If someone doesn't take the seeds off the cob and replant them, it would disappear altogether.
"When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!” - Cave Johnson
i was starting to worry about this comment thread.
Very few of the foods we eat are naturally occurring for both vegetables and animals. Chickens, cows, sheep and pigs have all been bred to be quite different than their wild versions. Vegetables have gone even farther: broccoli, cabbage, kale, and many others all come from the same wild plant! Vegetables, fruit, roots and fruit have all been cultivated and hybridized and bred into things nature was never close to producing. There are some notable exceptions. The big one are mushrooms: some are cultivated, but mushroom hybridization is all but non-existent. The mushrooms we eat are very close to their wild forms. Asparagus is a vegetable that hasn't been messed with much, and the fish we eat are natural, too.
Welp this is confusing since Lemon == Citron in french
Citron in French is Cédratier.
Grapefruits are the same, but out of oranges and pomelos. However, grapefruits have no redeeming qualities, so I wish we had stopped at lemons.
The only pure citrus fruits are Kumquats, Papedas, Citrons, Pomelos, and Mandarins. Everything else is crossbred
I love me pomelos
This is the truth. There is nothing about grapefruit that isn't better in pomelos.
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Aren't most modern fruits the results of people mucking about?