How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Satsuma
When I get the flu, I typically rely on one routine: stock up on Quils (both Day- and Ny-) and scarf down a box of Satsuma Mandarins in front of a Netflix offering that doesn’t require too many brain bytes.
But in recent years, something happened—something nefarious perhaps—where I found it increasingly difficult to find “proper” Satsumas. The Satsumas I love have stem and leaves still attached with dirt still dusting the bumpy skin as if the farmer had just delivered them from the orchard; easily peeled, these Satsumas often reveal an impossibly thin gap of air between the skin and the sweet fruit, releasing a mild aroma. No, the Satsumas I’m running into these days just. aren’t. the. same.
I began to wonder if I was suffering from early symptoms of Get Off My Lawn Nostalgia Syndrome, where nothing is as good as it used to be (music) or if there was actually something to this, like my grandmother’s complaints about McDonald’s fries (where it turns out McDonald’s had changed its frying oil).
So I started Googling.
First of all, instead of political science or international studies, I should’ve studied botany, horticulture, or whatever field covers rabbit-holing across the Internet in pursuit of little fruit obsessions. After all, citrus has as compelling of an origin story as any in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Most modern citrus comes from three fruits: the citron, the pomelo, and the mandarin. It’s a “little bit like blending and reblending primary colors.” For example, “[m]ix certain pomelos and certain mandarins and you get a sour orange. Cross that sour orange with a citron and you get a lemon.” A rather promiscuous bunch, citrus “naturally hybridizes when two varieties are planted near each other,” and “[c]itrus trees [have] been planted casually … with hybrids springing up all over the place, and very little documentation of who planted what, and which mixed with which.”
As for Satsuma Mandarins (Citrus unshiu): a very long time ago, one particular mandarin variety fell in love with a pomelo (or a pomelo variety), and their offspring crossed with another mandarin variety quite similar to the parent mandarin, resulting in uh, a “highly inbred" mandarin-pomelo hybrid. The name is credited to the wife of General-Congressman-Ambassador-Florida Supreme Court Justice-chronic underachiever Robert Bruce Van Valkenburgh, who supposedly sent trees back to the United States when her husband was posted in Japan (Satsuma is a southern Japanese province). Groves throughout California, the Gulf Coast, and the Southeast now grow the Satsuma, with even towns in Alabama, Texas, and Florida named after the fruit because it really is that good.
But why let perfect become the enemy of perfect-er? In the 1970s, Japanese scientists hybridized the Satsuma with a sweet orange (itself a hybrid of a pomelo and a mandarin). Their child—the Kiyomi—was hybridized again with the Ponkan, which resulted in… the Sumo®. That’s right, the massive (and expensive) honker you see coveted by influencers and shilled by artisan markets is the Satsuma’s grandkid, and actually called the Dekopon in Japan.
Dekopon (next to a Japanese pack of cigarettes for scale?).
The history of the Satsuma is nerd-bait in and of itself: after all, its story intertwines with that of a Civil War officer who fought in Antietam and found himself representing the United States in the middle of the Meiji Restoration in Japan. But the Dekopon doubles down, weaving a tale of one farmer’s persistence, international rivalries, and corporate espionage. Initial quality of the Dekopon was too inconsistent for sale until one Japanese farmer, who went all-in on the cultivar, noticed that a counterintuitive watering pattern induced the consistency needed for market. Then, “[i]n what was widely regarded as a national embarrassment, in 1998 the variety somehow showed up being grown by Japan’s rival, South Korea, where it is now farmed on Jeju Island and called Hallabong (after Hallasan, the country’s tallest mountain).”
Because of strict laws regulating the import of foreign plants into the United States, an American citrus grower paid for the legally required quarantine and sterilization of Dekopon trees, a laborious process that can take years. Meanwhile, competitors and even an “outpost of a Japanese religious and farming cult” smuggled in Dekopons, although supposedly the plant police (which is a thing) burned the illicit Dekopons down. Eventually, the rights to the “clean” Dekopon growths were sold to a wealthy Southern Californian developer, who desperately tried to beat competitors to market with the Sumo®, “[a] fruit… almost preternaturally flavorful … [whose] membranes around the segments [are] gossamer thin [and] flesh [that is] firm but juicy, almost silky, register[ing] so high on [a] refractometer, an instrument for estimating sugar content,” that the LA Times writer who Woodward-and-Bernstein-ed the Dekopon story “first thought the device was broken.”
All that fuss, traceable back to my beloved Satsumas, which again, aren’t as good as they used to be.
Satsumas.
Right? To find out whether my suspicions about recent Satsuma production could be substantiated, I reached out to experts at Texas A&M and Auburn University. One of them, Professor James Spiers, graciously responded with a detailed response. In short, while it’s possible I personally encountered shittier Satsumas, there are no obvious structural issues that would explain a recent, across-the-board degradation of Satsuma quality. For example, the most prevalent Satsuma cultivar, the Owari Satsuma, does produce better fruit on older trees, and so climactic or pest impacts on older growths could mean lower quality Satsumas hitting the market. Furthermore, there are other cultivars that produce earlier in the season, but sometimes farmers wait to harvest them until the peels turn more orange, because we consumers are so finicky about our orange-y fruits looking, well, orange. The price to pay for this enhanced store appeal, however, can mean much lower acidity, leaving the fruit tasting a bit “watered down.” Finally, Californian-grown Satsumas are apparently inferior to those grown in the Southeast, although truth be told, I couldn’t tell if this was Professor Spiers fanning the flames of the horticultural equivalent of a Pac-12/SEC rivalry.
So no, the Satsumas weren’t better back in the good ol’ days, and I should stop being such a crank. On the other hand, being irrationally stubborn about Satsumas sparked an adventure where I learned about a) the fruit’s provenance and progeny; b) the obscenely legendary career of Robert Bruce Van Valkenburgh; and c) the existence of investigative fruit journalism! Perhaps a career change awaits, and I can get paid to complain about bad fruits, or to chase down the secrets behind the decadent ones.