@markinarushI was excited when I saw these red velvet apricots but then after one search I realize I’d been deceived These weren’t some new brand of apricot I missed, they were one of many types of plumcot And these were good but they also are in a long line of fruit branding that isn’t fully accurate with what the fruit is. We often buy things we have familiarity with so this is understandable but it’s good to be a bit skeptical in the produce aisle. #stonefruitseason #plumcot #apricot #redvelvetapricot

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A plumcot IS a hybrid of an apricot and a plum, but calling it simply an “apricot” is slightly off. Kingsburg Orchards developed this variety, following their Black Velvet apricots (also not apricots). They clearly have a particular sense of what fruit should be called. Plumcots, alongside pluots and apriums, have the most out there naming of any fruit type - and we’re deep in their late summer season. Family Tree farms in Central California’s plum kingdom loves to do this: the King Kong, Flavor Grenade, Plumogranate, Starburst and Flavor Gator.

This is partially because of the variety. There are hundreds of varieties of pluot, plumcot and aprium, coming in green, red, pebbled, yellow and black colors. It’s easy for farms to sell a proprietary pluot under a proprietary name. These varieties are a modern invention, since Floyd Zaiger began developing them in the 1980s. Other fruits are hundreds or even thousands of years old with cultural weight from crossing the Silk Road, trekking the Atlantic, or being smuggled out of Japan. Most orange and apple varieties were named by people who are long dead. Pluots were invented barely a lifetime ago.

And they were developed right in 1980s America in a rapidly financializing, “greed is good” culture. So these fruits followed the branding work of the day with farms coming up with evocative, highly sellable fruits. Floyd Zaiger’s own dapple dandy pluot is often rebranded as the dino egg.

Ultimately agriculture is a very, very big business and marketing naturally plays a big role. But this has meant our cultural relationship with fruit is with a brand and not the fruit itself. A bag of Halo and Cutie mandarin brands could be a few varieties of mandarin depending on the season. For a very brief period of the 2010s the Grapple was center stage in the fruit world. A grape and apple can’t be hybridized, but the name certainly leaves the door open. The fruit was discontinued by 2020.

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Getting Americans to try out a new fruit is a feat. We stick to a relatively small number of fruits, so convincing us to grab an unknown orb from the shelves is a tall ask. Fruit producers either play to novelty, pink pineapples, red kiwis, sumo hat oranges, to maximize catching the eye or reduce the barriers to entry as low as possible, picking a name closely related to what we already know.

The best fruit naming for me came this weekend with some enormous peaches at the Upper West Side greenmarket. Truly the biggest I’ve ever seen. The man ringing me up told me they were seeds from Texas that took years to fruit in his New Jersey soil. “Watermelon Peaches,” he called them. I googled this variety later with nothing to be found. But it was a giant, perfectly tangy-sweet peach I’ll never forget the name of.

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The Spring freezes on the East Coast had us pulling our parkas back out and critically damaged the peach crop this year. At that point peaches had already begun to bloom ahead of the peak stone fruit season beginning in May. Freezes in March and April wiped out massive parts of the harvest from the Hudson Valley, New Jersey, Texas, Ohio and even the peach state.

This weather event, combined with mild winters in the Southeast, harmed the peach harvest, risking a nearly peachless summer. Many farms built massive, makeshift space heaters to preserve the crops. There are still some peaches on farmers market aisles, but nowhere near the abundance we’ve come to expect. And in peach-famed Georgia, it may have impacted up to 80% of the iconic crop.

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Peaches in fact aren’t indigenous to Georgia - or America - at all. They originate in China where they’ve likely been cultivated for thousands of years. They spread across the Silk Road and eventually made it to North America via Spanish monks who brought them to Florida in the 1500s. In a way they became America’s first invasive species, spreading beyond Florida. They were particularly beloved by the Cherokee, who cultivated and traded the fruit wider across the continent. By the time British settlers arrived in Jamestown in the 1600s, they were convinced the peach was native to the Americas because of the abundance.

Today peaches grow all across the United States, but are especially well suited to growing in the Southeast: Georgia and South Carolina. While Georgia no longer leads the country in peach production (that’s - as always - California), the state is synonymous with the sweet red-orange fruit. Georgia popularized the peach in the United States, shipping it across the country in the 1800s and developing cold shipping in the process. During Reconstruction, the peach served as an important part of the Georgia economy, eventually leading to the Peach State nickname. Where I grew up near Atlanta the name Peachtree is everywhere from street signs to hospitals to 5ks.

Georgia may be number 3 in peach production today, but its crop is still substantial and well noted for its flavor. The freeze in March may have destroyed a majority of the crop, a massive loss. And with the extreme weather events and milder winters that come with our changing climate this is now a common occurrence, there was a similar freeze event in 2017 and a smaller scale version in 2023. Georgia’s climate isn’t nearly as consistently friendly to peaches as it once was.

“No Peaches Today” could extend beyond 2026 as the climate shifts if and where peaches (and many other fruits) can grow. The frequency and unpredictability of extreme weather may mean the highway-side stands with hand painted peach signs of my childhood may have no peaches ever.

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@markinarushApriums are one of many apricot-plum hybrids (and one of my favorites) They were invented in the 80s and are really taking off in popularity. Have you tried one? #aprium #apricot #plum #stonefruitseason

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My fruit bowl full of these hybrids owes everything to America’s most famous fruit grower - Luther Burbank. Credited with developing more than 800 plants, he specifically had a knack for plums with more than 120 plums and plumcots.

But he got his start with potatoes, American’s biggest vegetable. One of his first discoveries was a dark brown russetted potato, one that today anyone familiar with the McDonald’s drive through would know. The Burbank potato (later renamed the Russet Burbank) became the most widely grown potato in America and the preferred potato of the golden arches. He sold the rights to it for $150 at the time.

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Burbank took his potato winnings to head West to Santa Rosa, California, eventually purchasing a farm near Sebastopol where he began hybridizing fruits. He crucially began importing Japanese plums, which tended to be larger and more flavorful than their European cousins. By 1906 he created the Santa Rosa plum, a candy sweet juicy red plum. It eventually accounted for at least a third of California’s plum harvest.

In Gilded Age America, Burbank also understood how to develop his profile through the media. He released plant catalogs, made for laypeople rather than scientists. This rapid release of novel fruits gained him popularity among the press and a word-of-mouth reputation among Americans who loved fruit. Burbank had become the first American fruit influencer by the turn of the century, capturing the attention of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. At the time Burbank was considered their peer in invention by the popular imagination.

His focus on reputation brought him criticism from the scientific community who thought he didn’t focus enough on the scientific process. And his celebrity took on a darker dimension in his support for the American eugenics movement where he legitimized a racist ideology.

In the early 20th century Burbank secured investment from robber baron of the day Andrew Carnegie and a business partnership with the Stark Brother’s Nurseries & Co. who eventually commercialized the Red Delicious apple, leading to massive commercial success of many of his fruits.

Included in those 120+ Burbank plum varieties was the plumcot, the groundbreaking hybrid of apricots and plums. But it bruised easily, so it didn’t take off commercially. In the 1950s Floyd Zaiger, a WWII paratrooper, bought a farm in Modesto, California, also hybridized stone fruits with Burbank’s methods. In 1989 he took the plumcot concept to create the pluot - a 75%/25% cross. It’s a trademarked variety that’s become increasingly popular also due to Zaiger’s stature and fruit influencers who loved California farmer’s market varieties. It’s now quite popular on grocery shelves, including mine.

Commercialized fruit isn’t new, but it isn’t quite old. Humans have been cultivating fruit for tens of thousands of years with natural mutations throughout. What’s different today - and something both Burbank and Zaiger understood - is among an endless new variety of fruits, real storytelling and cultural resonance is required to bring new fruits to our baskets and bowls for decades to come.

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Compounded by budget cuts at the FDA and CDC, the slow discovery of the source of the outbreak is also a predictable endpoint of our knotted food supply chain. And this industrialized food system started with stone fruit, a Georgia peach.

Up until the 1870s fruit very much depended on where you live in America, something signified by the neverending varieties of apples localized to mountain North Carolina, the Hudson Valley or lakeside Michigan. And if you were lucky enough to be from Georgia, you might be able to have the juiciest peaches in summer.

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And in Marshallville, Georgia, Samuel Rumph had grown up amongst peach groves. Most peaches are extremely delicate, bruising during shipping and ripening quickly. In the 1870s one peach in particular became beloved to Rumph and his wife Clara Elberta Moore. It was large, tasted great and most importantly stayed quite firm. The Elberta peach, as it was soon called, stayed so firm that it survived the train journey in 1875 from Marshallville to New York City, where the Elberta became a craze.

From the success of his peach, Rumph was convinced he could commercialize fruit. He designed new fruit crates that could carry both the peaches and ice, keeping them cool and fresher for longer. This later led to a railroad partnership for railway cars that held both ice and peaches. Rumph not only made the Peach State the Peach State, but he invented cold supply chains in the process.

Today refrigerated shipping has resulted in an abundance of fruit now available around the world. In New York I can have California citrus, Mexican dragon fruit and Indian mangos. And people around the world get access to fruits often year round. But it also means we’re so far removed from where our food comes from.

The glimmer against this trend: modern farmer’s markets. This week the Greenmarket in New York City celebrated its 50th anniversary. Opened by urban planners Barry Benepe and Bob Lewis in 1976, they took the then old farmers market concept to buck the trend of consolidation and depersonalization of our produce. It solved two problems, bringing struggling small farmers too small to access industrialized supply chains with produce deprived urban dwellers too far removed from farms themselves.

Today there are greenmarkets all across the city every day of the week. And it was part of a national network of urban markets that became trendy from the 1990s on. Undoubtedly these are magic, places for kumquats and community, discovery and donut peaches. But as is so common in America there’s a hollowed middle - Americans far enough out of cities to go to the greenmarket, but not close enough to farms. The suburbs and exurbs only really have one option: uniform supermarkets full of dull colored strawberries and fibrous mangos.

But we’ve seen the answer from fruttivendoli in Italy, the fruteria in Buenos Aires and even Robert Is Here in South Florida. All examples of institutions that connect the buyer with where their food originates either by proximity or by knowledge. Instead of fruit being taken for granted, it’s brought into context with knowledge and seasonality. There are signs that Americans do hold fruit to high regard: Sumo citrus and donut peaches. We just need the institutions around them to untangle a knot of industrialized produce.

And it shouldn’t take an untraced outbreak to make that clear.

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After yelling at me for touching the fruit (more on that later), the owner selected the orange Calanda peach (a protected Spanish variety you can’t get in the US) I was after, weighed it and sent me on my way down an impossibly chic Milanese street with a brown paper bag of fruit. The height of luxury.

Frutteto Garibaldi is an archetypal Italian fruttivendolo or greengrocer (literally “fruit seller” in Italian) - stores dedicated to fruits. It’s somewhere between the palace to fruit of Japan’s Sembikiya and the everyday fruteria in Buenos Aires. Fruttivendoli vary from large shops to street carts with both high and low end iterations.

Today, these are part of an ecosystem of specialty food stores and where many Italians do their produce shopping at stores like this, but the roots are deep. In Ancient Rome the Forum Holitorium was dedicated to fruit and vegetable sellers. This survived to Medieval Padua where the Piazza della Frutta maintained fruit sellers as well as a center of social life (and retains its name today).

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Fruttivendoli took hold both because of Italy’s particular affinity to seasonal fruits (from Sicily’s blood oranges to Amalfi’s lemons) and because the supermarket came later to Italy, only really becoming popular from the 1970s onward - nearly 50 years later than the US. While the habit of going to the fruttivendolo has persisted, supermarkets are rapidly consolidating in Italy, putting these neighborhood stalwarts at risk.

Frutteto Garibaldi was not my first fruttivendolo in my short Milan stint. Just after landing, while waiting on my hotel room, I speed walked to L’Orto di Jack nearby. This local chain of high end fruttivendoli was impossibly enticing on Google Maps. Once there it was even more with crates of peaches and apricots being misted from the overhang above.

A handsome Italian man stepped out, asking if I needed any help. I proceeded to wander around the store with him pointing at fruit, asking what they were, where they were from and the history behind it. He recommended some local red and yellow apricots that I now forget the name of and explained that the flavor the the green peaches were very sweet rather than sour like I’d assumed. I ultimately bought 3 nectarines, 6 apricots (2 of them yellow), 4 peaches (2 of them green) - all of them gorgeous.

There’s a very specific choreography to the fruttivendoli. You can look, but not touch, lest you risk being yellow or swatted at (I learned this when I squeezed a peach only to have a man nearly sprinting to tell me I couldn’t touch). You’re meant to talk to the fruit vendor, building a relationship with your local vendolo. You trust that they’ll have the most seasonal fruit, give you recommendations on what to buy and pick out the best fruit from the crate. They’ll also have the variety of green peach or yellow apricot that you simply won’t find at Aldi.

Of course this is a far cry from the American supermarket’s faceless pick-your-own peach endeavor. But it’s also unlike our expectations for strawberries in January and blood oranges in July. The seasonal fruits are front and center. And in America this certainly exists, nearly always driven by immigrant communities from Italian to Korean to Dominican. In those cases fruit comes packaged with a direct relationship with the seller, not a self-check out kiosk.

In total I went to 5 different fruttivendoli on my 5 day trip to Milan and Rapallo, Italy. All different vibes, often reflective of the owner, but in all cases beautiful fruit that was delicious. By the last one when buying a donut peach (or tabacchiera in Italian) I’d gotten the whole ritual down: a quick conversation, questions about what’s most delicious and a brown bag packed by the store owner. Luxury and cultural depth that even Prada needed a piece of.

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Admittedly, America’s history with apricots is short for one of the most ancient fruits. Apricots likely originate in northern China, but spread throughout ancient Asia from Armenia to India potentially as far back as 6,000 years ago. And they were an early commodity on the Silk Road, taking particular hold in Western Asia - becoming a cornerstone of Persian cuisine, the eventual national fruit of Armenia, Turkey’s near monopoly on dried apricots and the Egyptian saying “bukra fil mishmish” ( “tomorrow in Apricot season,” for its short late June/early July season, basically meaning the English equivalent of “when pigs fly”).

From Armenia Alexander the Great is credited with introducing the fruit to Greece and later Rome. Arabic traders later spread it across the Mediterranean world where they became beloved by French royalty, growing specialty types in Provence. And in Italy’s Campania region the volcanic soil of Mt. Vesuvio created some of the most delicious varieties of apricot.

And in Rapallo, Italy last week I returned to the same hotel for breakfast, racing back to that fruit bowl, filling it with apricots and taking a few with me to snack on at the beach later. This appreciation didn’t develop at my grocery store, it took trips to a Milanese frutteto, a Turkish market and a Swiss farm stand. I’ve tried American apricots and the flavor never quite gets there.

Apricots arrived in America in the 1700s with the British bringing them to Virginia and the Spanish bringing them to California. And in California - as with many American fruits - they flourished. Before it was Silicon Valley the Santa Clara valley was a hub for growing apricots. But they didn’t take hold in other parts of the country like peaches and cherries did, so trying an apricot in the rest of the country meant these delicate fruits had to travel far and be picked early - meaning a lesser taste.

Throughout the 20th century apricot demand stifled alongside production. Starting in WWI it shifted to dried apricots when access to European imports were cut off. And it continued to shift towards dried, canned and frozen apricots with eventually the vast majority grown only for preserving. The shift meant the flavor of fresh apricots declined to today’s fruit that generally isn’t meant for fresh eating outside a few varieties. I see that in my grocery store where I try each summer to find a great apricot but the flavor is never quite there.

As flavors of fresh apricots declined, so did production. A booming Silicon Valley replaced apricot production with tech campuses. And cheaper Turkish dried apricots made it economically difficult to farm. The Royal Blenheim apricot is America’s most delicious apricot with a real nostalgia for central Californians. But today only a few farms grow them for a very short few week season every year.

Apricots are a fruit ripe for American discovery alongside dragon fruit and Sumo citrus. Its Euro summer connotation and connection to Persian and Provencal recipes should make it easy to market. But for the flavor to match the lore great apricots need to be accessible and today that requires a trip to Armenia or Italy, or the right timing at the right farm in California.

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The Bing Cherry is the most common cherry variety in the US today, making up a majority of cherry production. A type of sweet cherry, it has a deeply syrupy flavor with just enough tart notes to balance it out. It’s easy to identify with a signature dark red color both inside and on the skin. It’s an accidental cross between the Royal Ann and the Black Republican cherries, created in late 19th century America right as production was kicking off in the now cherry dominant Pacific Northwest.

In the 1840s two Quaker brothers, Henderson and Seth Lewelling, established the first commercial nursery in Oregon. They were prominent abolitionists in mid-19th century America - Henderson’s house was thought to be a prominent stop on the Underground Railroad. As the fervor of Westward expansion grew Henderson set off with hundreds of fruit trees pulled by oxen, eventually settling in the Willamette Valley, Oregon with Seth later joining him. Their fruit enterprise grew and they began hiring in the 1850s, including a foreman named Ah Bing.

Ah Bing was born in northern China and immigrated to the United States shortly before being hired by the Lewelling brothers. Bing worked for the orchard for likely 30+ years, reportedly taking more and more responsibility for overseeing workers and cultivation of the cherries. Sometime in the 1870s Bing was overseeing rows of Black Republican cherries and an open pollination of a new cherry was found growing, crossed with a Royal Ann cherry. Upon the discovery, Seth Lewelling insisted that it be named after the man who cultivated them - the Bing Cherry (this may not have all been generosity though, as Lewelling already had a cherry named after him). The Bing Cherry quickly became popular in Oregon for its rich flavor and large size. By the 1890s it gained the attention of the country by being showcased at the Chicago World’s Fair.

But reportedly, Ah Bing was not there to see the success of his namesake cherry in America. By the 1880s violence, xenophobia and racism against Chinese immigrants had taken root in the American West. And Congress passed both the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Scott Act that barred Chinese immigration to America. Ah Bing reportedly returned to China multiple times during his work with the Lewellings and he went back likely around 1889. Due to the restrictions by the new laws, he was not able to return to the US ever again.

Ah Bing had a tremendous influence on the cherries we eat, but his contribution was nearly erased to US immigration policy. There are very few documented sources about him - and often they conflict. What we do know is that in the late 1800s he worked on the cherry nursery that produced our most dominant cherry of today. Cherries that are still often cultivated by immigrants to America.

This year Ah Bing’s story came back to prominence when Julia Kuo and Livia Blackburne published “Bing’s Cherries,” a children’s book that documented his life and reclaimed his place in American fruit history - just as important as any Johnny Appleseed.

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But the donut peach is ancient, its name isn’t. These peaches have grown in China since at least the 10th century BC when they first appeared in writings and were known as Pan Tao (literally “flat peach”). In ancient China these were the peaches of the gods, growing every 3,000 years and providing immortality to the eater. These peaches are most evidently flat, but also have a deeper, more honeyed flavor with less acidic notes to classic yellow peaches. This singular shape and taste took these peaches on the Silk Road in the ancient world to the Middle East and to Europe. They didn’t make their way to North America until much later - in the 1820s

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Initially these were imported by William Prince, an early fruit importer in Flushing Queens - the same neighborhood where vibrant immigrant fruit culture lives today. They also made their way to Augusta, Georgia where Prospect Berkman had 11 flat peach varieties at his Fruitland nursery in the Peach State itself. Early growers had a difficult time cultivating the fruit, which clung tightly to branches, and American consumers were skeptical of the irregular shape. They never took off.

In the 60s and 70s, though, researchers at Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station hybridized flat peaches to a larger size and sweeter taste, naming them the Saturn peach after the ringed planet. The famed Stark Brothers brought them to market in 1983 with a patent until the early 21st century. And yet they still didn’t quite take off.

The Saturn name was one of many names these peaches have had. In China they began as the Pan Tao. In Sicily they became known as the snuffbox peach (Pesca Tabacchiera), resembling the tiny boxes used to carry tobacco. In Spain and Portugal they were given the “exotic” name Paraguayo, despite not being from Paraguay. American popularity required one more name change: the donut peach.

In the early 2000s the Stark Bros patent on Saturn peaches was coming up and the Queen of Kiwi in America set sights on the fruit. Frieda Rapoport Caplan is an icon of the fruit world and nearly invented fruit marketing. She rose through the fruit industry in mid-century America, beginning with a small mushroom stand in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. Through her company, Frieda’s Specialty Produce, she successfully branded kiwis in the US, renaming them from Chinese Gooseberry to Kiwi. Between the 60s and 80s her marketing brought kiwis to 80% of grocery stores in the country. She is credited with inventing fruit packaging and introducing sugar snap peas, sunchokes, guava, blood oranges, passion fruit and many more to the American market.

Frieda set sights on the flat peach, renaming them donut peaches (when you pop the pit out of the middle, these peaches resemble donuts). This immediate recognizability and sweetly evocative name transformed this peach in America. In the 2000s they quickly took off, resulting in over 20 versions like UFOs, Sweet Bagels and TangOs. At my farmers market I found donut nectarines and a very rare (still not fully identified) green flat peach. Today they’re just as common as regular peaches on grocery shelves.

With pink pineapple and red kiwis the fruit industry is intent on designing fruit for our TikTok feeds. But the donut peach simply needed a new name from the queen of fruit marketing to make a peach that’s been with us for thousands of years trendy.

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Biting into my first peach is the real signal that summer has begun and on Thursday I came home with 2 peaches, a giant bag of red cherries, a donut peach and a nectarine. I squeezed many of the peaches for a ripe one I could eat that night, but all were firm so I patiently waited for the perfect slightly soft-but-not-too-soft ripeness. The day they got there I was taking a train so took them on with a few napkins, biting into that distinctly floral, sweet, juicy, fresh with a slight tang - a taste of June through September.

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A flavor that took me back to this time last year on a walk home eating a white peach like an apple, juice dripping down my wrists. I wrote out an iphone note “stone fruit lore” to be turned into Tiktok videos and, eventually, this newsletter.

Let’s start with the basics: we call them stone fruits for the “stone” or large pit in the center of the fruit. These are also known as “drupes” and refer to fruits with a soft fleshy part surrounding a shelled pit that contains a seed inside. This definition technically makes olives, almonds (the actual seed), raspberries (collections of drupes with tiny seeds) and mangoes stone fruits (although this newsletter considers mangoes on their own).

These are ancient, distinctly old world fruits, originating in Asia and Europe and playing a key role in Silk Road trade of the ancient world. Peaches and plums are perhaps the oldest with some evidence of them being grown by humans in prehistoric times. Peaches and apricots originated in China thousands of years BC, making their way to ancient Greece and Rome via trade routes as the Mediterraneans traded figs and pomegranates. Cherries originate in modern Turkey, supposedly being brought to Europe by birds. Products like sour cherries and dried apricots became staples in the ancient world.

These fruits took on mythic status in cultures around the world. In ancient Chinese texts peaches deeply symbolized immortality and frequently featured in writings. In Armenia apricots are so beloved they were made a national symbol. In Japan plum blossoms are the most gorgeous of poetry subject and ume is a staple of cuisine. In America a founding myth consists of one George Washington and his cherry tree.

Stone fruits - with the exception of some native plums - were all brought by European colonization, but they’ve become a massive part of our agriculture, especially in California. Today, American fruit culture is often lackluster because of the year round availability, but stone fruits defy this. We go into produce shelves with fruit blindness - the same strawberries and red delicious apples on shelves. But not stone fruit. You’ll see a rare peach or a winter plum on February shelves, but more likely you won’t see them at all until they burst onto the scene in May/June. A fruit that forces us to seasonally appreciate: grilled peaches at the barbecue, cherry pies in the backyard and any variation of stone fruit cobbler.

While apples store well to be sold longer times and oranges ship well from places like Florida and Mexico, stone fruits defy long haul shipping. Their softness makes it difficult to ship as they easily get damaged, requiring farmers to pick them very early. While they will ripen, their flavor doesn’t mature in the same way, leading to a soft, flavorless peach…a disappointment. Stone fruits also require specific conditions (like cold weather) to grow appropriately, so the season hasn’t successfully been extended as we’ve done with other fruits in greenhouses or in the tropics.

Farmers markets are a must in stone fruit season due to the fleeting nature and sheer variety. One week you’ll find a deep red Elephant Heart Plum and the next in the same barrel find green colored donut peaches. This is a time when frequent trips to markets and the grocery store rewards you with unique types of fruit.

If you’re ever going to get really into fruit this is the season to do so. Stone fruit is in season roughly May to September depending on the type with peak flavors most often in July. Here’s what to look for in order of availability:

• Apricots (mid-May to June): the earliest stone fruit with the shortest season. Look for bright orange colored fruits and don’t eat them until quite soft with a slight honey scent or they won’t be good at all.

• Cherries (mid-June to August): these are the most seasonal because they’re so delicate. Shipped from Washington and California most commonly, they’re so delicious and often fleeting. Make sure to try the creamy Ranier yellow-red variety or the deep red sour cherries.

• Peaches (June to September): the star of stone fruit season and so delicious when you get them locally. Make sure they’re slightly soft and give to the touch for peak flavor and try literally every type from white peaches to donut peaches.

• Nectarines (May to October): my favorite stone fruit and actually a genetic mutation of the peach so no fuzzy skin. Like peaches they come in yellow, white and donut.

• Plums (May to October): the highest variety in the stone fruit world with a lot of variance availability, color and flavor. Plums seem to get a bad reputation, but you’ll absolutely find a type that you like from the Damson to the Santa Rosa.

• Other varieties: plumcots, apriums, pluots, nectacots might be difficult to find, but farmers markets will have the most unique types.

In kumquat I’ll be going through the lore of all the stone fruits all summer long from how we got to Georgia peaches to the branding behind saturn peaches to the plum varieties that started at a small California farm.

Subscribe to kumquat - stone fruit season is just getting started.

Modern strawberries come from both the Americas and Europe. Europe had small, not particularly flavorful strawberries, but they’ve been eaten for centuries. They first appeared in Roman writings in the first century BC and eventually were cultivated by monasteries in the middle ages, used for medicine and ornamentation. In the Americas the berries were larger with a richer taste and Native Americans like the Iroquois and the Cherokee held a deep connection with strawberries and the spring season.

These cross-continental strawberries were brought together through French exploration and espionage. In the 1500s a French explorer brought back North American strawberries from Quebec to France. Two centuries later when the French crown wanted to keep tabs on the Spanish fortifications in Chile and Peru they sent a spy - Amédée-François Frézier - to South America. It’s unclear what intelligence he brought back, but he did bring back a few plants of the Chilean strawberry (a large, white and tasty berry), using his water rations to keep them alive.

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In the 1700s the modern strawberry came out of these French expeditions in Brittany when the Chilean strawberry was crossed with the North American strawberry. This was the first hybrid strawberry and the parent of most major varieties today. This new variety became popular in the French royal court, cementing its place in history.

And over the last few weeks I took my own expedition to the descendents of these strawberries. In Kerry, Ireland on a road trip I stopped at a fruit shop for locally grown strawberries. The next morning in a cottage in Dingle, I cut up these strawberries as my friend whipped up some fresh cream to see the deepest red colored strawberries. Eaten with the cream the vibrant sweetness stood out, unlike any strawberry I’d had before.

Irish Strawberries 🇮🇪

In Ireland the strawberry industry didn’t really develop until World War 2 halted all strawberry imports to the island and growers in Wexford (the “Sunny Southeast”) began growing their own strawberries for the first time and sold them out of roadside stands. The roadstands still exist today and strawberries are well loved in the summer - particularly with whipped cream.

A week later I was in Stockholm where stand after stand and grocery store after grocery store prominently displayed strawberries with the Swedish flag on the container. I bought a flag-branded container at ICA, the Swedish grocery chain, taking it back to the hotel to try the most intense strawberry flavor, also unlike any strawberry I’d had before.

Swedish Strawberries 🇸🇪

Swedes are extremely proud of their locally grown strawberries - which get the intense flavor from the “midnight sun” in Swedish summer. The long days of sunlight cause strawberries to have additional photosynthesis for a sweeter flavor. These strawberries - known as jordgubbar or “old earth man” in Swedish - play a key role in Midsommar celebrations (and they must be locally grown).

Finally returning home, I did my weekly farmers market run on the Upper West Side. After my European strawberry experience I was tempted by the rows of strawberry containers, bringing one home. Another incredibly sweet, if slightly less red, strawberry from a local New Jersey farm.

All three of these strawberries came as a surprise because on US grocery shelves we’ve been accustomed to the year round strawberry. You know the one: it has more white than red, the flavor is inconsistent & often sour and it’s never quite as sweet as you want it to be. This is because of refrigerated shipping. Beginning in the 1840s, farmers used the then-novel refrigerated shipping to ship their strawberries.

But strawberries are extremely perishable, getting mushy or moldy very quickly, so in the 1950s Driscoll’s released the Z5A - a type of strawberry created to ship extremely well. Our modern strawberry is often picked early before the sweetness can fully mature. And unlike a peach they won’t become more sweet once picked.

Strawberries are an iconic fruit for a reason - the bright red, the unique shape with green leaf top, the seeds. But when buying off the grocery shelf the concept of strawberry is often more compelling than the actual flavor. But when in season (and locally grown) these transform with a deeper flavor and a deeper red. This is a fruit that crossed from the Americas to Europe only to come back as a more flavorless strawberry than it started. So this summer, to avoid disappointment on your Fourth of July blueberry and strawberry flag cake, be sure your strawberries come somewhere nearby and not shipped hundreds of miles away. You’ll get a completely different fruit.

Mangoes originate in the region that encompasses modern day India, Bangladesh and Myanmar. Today there are hundreds of mango varieties, a fruit with tremendous cultural depth, playing a major role in India, Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, and that’s only South and Southeast Asia.

In the US our stores only stock the two generics. And of the two it’s reported that 80% of imported mangoes are the Tommy Atkins, a mango that was initially rejected by the Florida Mango Forum in the 1950s for being “unremarkable.” I personally don’t mind the Tommy, it has a nice tang uncommon with other mango types, but it is very fibrous (you’ll need to floss after) and lacks the classic floral sweet mango flavor. Try any specialty mango variety and the Tommy is simply a pale imitator. While many Americans deeply love the mango, it hasn’t taken up a mantle in mainstream American fruit culture.

Enter the Ataulfo Mango. I’d thankfully picked a perfectly ripe one after my run (you want it to be soft to the touch but not mushy with a floral smell) and peeled it like a banana for an almost sorbet consistency with the mango flavor you would conjure in your head - notes of peaches, a light sweetness with floral notes. And these mangoes do have a mantle in global history much more than the “honey” or “champagne” name would lead you to believe.

The Ataulfos roots are in the Spanish Manila-Acapulco galleon trade route, one of the very first global trade routes that connected Europe, the Americas and Asia. Silver from Peru was brought to the Philippines to trade for Chinese luxury goods to be brought back to Spain beginning in the 1500s. These ships could only cross twice a year across the Pacific, eventually bringing the sweet Carabao or Philippine mango to Mexico where they thrived (and most American mangoes come from today).

In the 1940s Ataulfo Morales Gordillo bought mango-tree rich land in Chiapas, Mexico with a few types of new, delicious mango. In the 1950s agricultural engineer Hector Cano Flores heard of the delicious mangos from his property, studied the new type and eventually landed on one that was released in the 1960s, naming it the Ataulfo. It gained popularity, eventually receiving a Mexican Denominacion de Origen, a protected status like French Champagne, meaning only mangoes from the volcanic Chiapas soil can be called “Ataulfo.” They’re one of only 18 designated, among tequila and mezcal.

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Despite the 200+ years of global trade and beloved status in Mexico, when the Ataulfo was imported by the Ciruli Brothers in the US it was given the name “Champagne mango” to differentiate, collapsing this history into the name of a different protected product. In 2017 the National Mango Board, a marketing organization for mangoes in the US, built a campaign renaming the Ataulfo to the “honey mango,” reasoning that Americans had a hard time pronouncing the original name. And so the two mango types “mango” and “honey” sit unremarkably on shelves and Instacard search results, one creamier than the other and with hundreds of years of global trade history.

In the last week another premium mango grabbed the spotlight with the full weight of history. The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and the Week reported on a scramble for the Alphonso mango among America’s (and Britain’s) elite. Known as “the king of mangoes” in India, it’s prized and expensive, known for a deep flavor and creamy texture (I have sadly not tried it). With disruption in global trade these have become even more valuable at $50+ for a dozen, leaving us with a third mango option that you’ll have to shell out for. There are signs of serious fruit culture, but so often it’s relegated to rarefied spaces, leaving the rest of us with contextless fruit.

In Season

• Berries: strawberries had a tough time in the Northeast from late frost but are picking up. Expect to see blueberries and raspberries in farmers markets imminently

• Early Stone Fruit: apricots are getting into peak and some early cherry varieties may start popping up (depending on where you’re based)

• Late Season Citrus: only two-ish weeks of Ojai Pixie season and Gold Nugget mandarins are still around. Both delicious.

Fruit Culture

• Kacey Musgraves performed her new song “Dry Spell” at the American Country Music awards over the weekend in a cheeky Country Mart set with peaches, figs, melons and bananas. It reminded me of when opulent grocery stores were a fixture on TV and in media (supermarket sweep?). We used to romanticize the supermarket, but now we only do when its Erewhon or Meadow Lane

• Prada collaborated with Milanese fruit stand Frutteto Garibaldi. It’s fitting that they’re showcasing a cologne with fruit, but more deeply there’s something luxurious about the old-world fruit stand. Stores with only one purpose that don’t need to maximize convenience.

enjoy kumquat? love the history of fruit? share this issue with someone!

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Americans, we’re so used to the same fruit on shelves week over week. A walk through my local Fairway means multiple colors of apples, piles of limes and big bundles of bananas all year round. We’re blind to the fruit we see everyday simply because it never changes. But sometimes that blindness is broken. And last week I walked across town to Kalustyan’s the Middle Eastern and Indian grocery institution to find a spellbreaker…the rarest of fruits that you’ll only find for a few weeks of the year..gojeh sabz

Literally meaning “green plum” in Persian, these tiny green orbs are unripe cherry plums picked early, crunchy and green. To Persians they have a deep connection to the start of spring - they’re only available mid-April through May. This timing is early, plum and stone fruit season is a bit further out.

When I got to Kalustyan’s a big cardboard box sat at the front of the store with mounds of them with a scoop to put them in your bag as if they were gumballs. I grabbed a large bag, alongside a similar crunchy, seasonal specialty fresh green almonds and walked home on the clearest spring Saturday in NYC. I arrived home, washing the plums to try a few. The refreshingly sour lemon juice flavor has an unmatched textural experience, a small fruit with a pit - like a crispy cherry with green apple tendencies.

Gojeh sabz are technically cherry plums, the same tree that lines streets across suburban America. Cherry plums originated in western Asia where they’ve been cultivated for thousands of years, a fruit showing up in texts of ancient Greeks and Romans. And they’ve been picked early and eaten green for a long time as well, adapting to Persian cuisine which highly favors acidity. Today they’re popular snacks in Turkey and across the Middle East. Often they’re eaten dipped in salt or chili powder to balance the sour flavor.

@little_lem0for my Seattle/Bellevue baddies 📍Oskoo Persian & Mediterranean Market in Bellevue #gojehsabz #greenplum #sourplum #crunchy

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I first tried these last year and this year they’ve made it TikTok big. They’re all over food feeds with bright colors and a microphone ready crunch. On Google trends terms like “green sour plums” and “persian market near me” have increased 300% over last year’s season. And its easy to see (and taste) why. These are relatively rare in the US, mostly in Persian, Middle Eastern or specialty grocery stores, so to find them is a flex. These plums also are only around briefly, compressing the time when people talk about them.

The recipe for virality here is the same recipe to combat our fruit blindness. Delicious, eye catching fruits with deep lore behind them and a catch-them-before-they’re-gone rarity.

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Pickings

I made a pilgrimage at the end of citrus season to a California farmers market a few days ago. I was in LA and made it to the Santa Monica Pico farmers market. The Garcia Organic stand was the stuff of dreams with dozens of citrus types, a few of which I’ve never tried. Here’s what I got:

• Yosemite Gold and Tahoe Gold Mandarins: two of the three gold varieties from University of California Riverside’s citrus growing program. These are large and bumpy, but mostly relegated to farmers markets as they don’t ship well. I couldn’t complete the trilogy because they didn’t have the Shasta Gold though :/

• Page Tangerine and Fremont Tangerine: two USDA created citrus in Orlando Florida, released in the 1960s. The Page is a cross between a tangelo and a clementine with a deep orange color, skin that clings to the fruit and an intense flavor. The Fremont is a cross between a clementine and a ponkan with a balanced flavor. A mid-century favorite mandarin that was later replaced by newer types of seedless tangerines.

• Sweet Lime: on first glance I thought these were lemons, but they’re a cross between a Mexican lime and a sweet citron, resulting in a flavor with very little acidity. I have not yet tried, so I’ll report back.

• Pixie tangerines: I wrote about these in kumquat a few weeks ago, but getting them from closest to the source made them really special.

• Minneola Tangelos: my favorite citrus and a late season variety, so plenty still to go as citrus season winds down.

If you love fruit as much as more, or you learned something in this issue I’d love for you to share kumquat!

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Fruit Lore

Just across from Sydney’s famous opera house and a 10 minute walk from the bustling Central Business District (CBD) I walked with my dad into the jungle on our last full day in Australia. We strolled quickly in perfect weather through giant monstera, palm trees and the Southern Hemisphere bunya pines that I’m obsessed with.

We’d booked an Aboriginal Bush Tucker tour at 11 am at the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney. “Bush Tucker” is a term used to describe foods native to Australia (in this case plants). Fruit related experiences are often curated: the Upstate apple picking, the Sembikiya food parlor, but this was something different.

Upon arriving at the gift shop, our First Nations guide explained his own story and how the Botanic Garden itself sits on Gadigal Country and walked and talked as he took us through to the Cadi Jam Ora section of the garden, which was the site of the first encounters between Aboriginal Australians and European settlers and today includes only native plants.

Walking a bit, our guide stopped and pointed at dozens of deep purple fruits on the ground and a cluster of them growing in a tree. Davidson Plums, a fruit I couldn’t believe I was seeing. Davidson plums refer to three different species of ancient Australian fruits that grow in the rainforests of Queensland and northern New South Wales. They’ve been eaten by Aboriginal Australians for thousands of years.

The thing is, though, it isn’t actually a plum. The name came in the 19th century when a sugarcane grower named JE Davidson encountered them. In 1900 botanist F.M. Bailey documented them in his book “Edible Fruits Indigenous to Australia.” He used both the native name Ooray and the Davidson Plum, but only one stuck.

A few of the purple fruits fell from the tree and our guide told us to pick a few of them up to try. Careful to follow our guide’s instructions, my dad and I wiped off and, to avoid eating the unwashed skin, opened the fruit to see the most vibrant light maroon color that got deeper closer to the seeds. On the outside it certainly looked like a plum but on the inside something completely different.

Taking a bite of the open fruit hit me with the strongest sour notes, an almost one to one flavor of the first taste of a Warhead candy. It was astringent in a good way, juicy with an almost tender watermelon texture. I only wish I’d grabbed a couple more as our guide later told us these were usually wild with only limited commercial production. More often these were found in jams and desserts than fresh.

Making our way further through the gardens we stopped at an enormous tree with a familiar scent. Earlier in the week on a run through Melbourne’s waterfront I ended up going 2 miles further than planned because I couldn’t get enough of the citrus-y smell from the tree lined route. The Lemon Myrtle’s leaves have a gorgeous scent somewhere between cut lemons and lemongrass. Not technically a citrus, but the tea from the leaves was a required buy for me.

Our guide stopped us to guess the name of the large bush with tiny red Christmas-light shaped berries. Luckily some of the Australians on the tour knew - Lilly Pilly, Australia’s most important berries that taste like a tiny green apple. I was astounded by the range of the 1 hour tour, learning about the rough leaves and fuzzy fruit of the Sandpaper Fig, bright Warrigal Greens (New Zealand spinach), giant Moreton Bay chestnut pods and the seeds of the Lomandra grass (none of these easy to eat fresh unfortunately). At the end a few folks on the tour had also booked a tasting in the cafe of native foods, something I wish I’d booked.

It was a true immersion into native Australian fruits, more variety than anything I’d seen in a Woolworths or Harris Farm Markets. My dad and I ended the tour with sticky hands from the tree fresh fruit and with many thanks to our guide for teaching the only 2 non-Australians on the tour about Aboriginal food and culture.

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Pickings

Spring is in full swing and we’re starting to see some very special fruits come into season:

• Persian Sour Green Plums, or Gojeh Sabz, are in their brief few week season. These are plums picked very young and green with a sour apple taste and crisp texture. They’re often eaten with salt.

• Similarly Fresh Green Almonds are also in season, a popular Middle Eastern snack. I found both at Kalustyan’s in NYC.

• Zespri is doing a major push for new types of kiwis in US grocery stores and I’m seeing their Ruby Red and Golden Kiwis everywhere (even some TikTok ads)

• Apricots are just getting into season and I’ve seen them at my Fairway. The real sign that stonefruit season is starting.

• Most importantly - we’re also just entering mango season. I picked up a Haden mango in Flushing and it was so delicious. If you can find mangoes that aren’t the Kent or Tommy Atkins, I’d recommend

Thanks for reading! If you love fruit as much as me, or discovered something new please share kumquat.

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Fruit Lore

I hesitate to call anything “the Erewhon of X,” given the baggage that comes with it, but when a friend recommended Harris Farm Markets as the Erewhon of Sydney it landed immediately on my to do list. Following a salty day hopping Sydney’s Eastern beaches - Bondi & its icebergs, Clovelly’s cement diving pool, Tamarama’s picturesque cove - I strolled into the blasting air conditioning of Harris Farm Markets Bondi.

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The first room was actual fruit heaven, full of beautifully laid out piles of red/gold/green kiwis, custard apples, giant papaya and jujubes. This, it turns out, is Harris Farm’s signature. Since starting as a greenmarket, David and Cathy Harris have built Harris Farm Markets as Sydney’s premier market with 33 locations and selections of unique produce. It’s one of Australia’s only family-owned grocery chains left with deep influence: in 2014 they popularized the “imperfect picks” concept of putting blemished fruit on sale (that later appeared in VC-backed Misfits Market in the US).

In the good 20-minutes I spent admiring the Harris Farm fruits I was especially struck by the piles of green fruit that looked like a cross between a lime and a pomegranate: the feijoa. I grabbed a few alongside some post-beach snacks and took it back to my Airbnb. A bit sunburned, I googled how to eat it. Taking a bite into the translucent banana/cucumber looking fruit, I was at a loss for words (see my TikTok). Herby mint, maybe some banana, a bit of strawberry all came through with a custard texture. It tasted like the best fruit smoothie you’ll ever have.

Feijoa is famous in the Southern Hemisphere from New Zealand to Brazil. They originate in South America where subtropical Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay meet. Indigenous Brazilians in Santa Catarina have eaten feijoa for at least 4,000 years. It belongs to the same family as guava, but isn’t technically one (even though it’s known to Brazilians as mountain guava).

From my first day in Australia at Melbourne’s famed Victoria Market I’d been seeing these fruits everywhere and every time I did they were bountiful, crates overflowing with green. They’re in season late summer to early fall, so I hit the very end of the season. But they don’t originate in Australia at all and took a circuitous route from the Southern Hemisphere to the Northern and back again.

It started in 1815 when German botanist Friedrich Sellow discovered the fruit in Brazil. He drowned before making it home, but managed to send specimens to Berlin. A Swiss naturalist is said to have planted them in Switzerland, but before that tree could fruit a French botanist beat him to it, introducing the fruit to Europe via Cannes, France in 1890. In 1901 an Italian horticulturalist imported them to Santa Barbara, California. And by 1908 they made their way to Australia and New Zealand. How’s that for a route.

After they reached New Zealand, Hayward Wright, the horticulturalist who developed the green kiwi we all eat today, traveled the country in the 1920s promoting the feijoa as a perfect backyard tree. He knew feijoa bruised too easily to be shipped globally the way kiwis were, so instead of exporting he made them a part of everyday New Zealand life. And he created a fruit culture that made feijoa an unofficial national fruit.

@itskatmaMY FAVE FRUIT EVER #feijoa #fruit #nz #newzealand #fruitcutting

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In New Zealand - and to a lesser extent Australia - there’s a culture around feijoas like that of New York and apples. When in season there’s an expectation that they’re shared - it’s been called “the people’s fruit” for how Kiwis give them away. Feijoas are made into wines, ice creams and candies. They’re grown everywhere and New Zealand is the world’s largest producer, feeding into Harris Farm’s overflowing crates.

Feijoas actually do grow around the world though and in America they do quite well in the Bay Area. But it’s in the Southern Hemisphere where they thrive. In South America they have deep roots. In Australia and New Zealand the culture around them has become so deeply embedded - they’re linked with childhood and the autumn season.

It results in a “fruit blindness” seen with such frequency on trees and grocery shelves that your eyes simply don’t register. It’s the same way that I’d walk by a display of granny smiths without even a second look. At Harris Farm I saw feijoas as a curiosity that I had to look up and could hardly describe the flavor, but for Australians and New Zealanders there was never a time they didn’t know how a feijoa tastes.

Pickings

• The Ruby Red Kiwi that I tried in Australia just launched in the US. They’re red for the same reason blood oranges are and I’d expect to see these everywhere soon

• I’m exceptionally jealous of these creators who grow over 30 fruit trees in their yard. I’m most certainly in the wrong climate zone

Fruit Lore

Fresh from a 20+ hour flight I visited the famed Victoria Market in Melbourne as my first stop. The Queen’s Harvest right at the end had beautiful displays of multiple kiwi types, cut pineapple and mandarins. But in a small basket in front of the register it had small pepper-looking fruits with the very high cost of 119 Australian dollars per kg (likely a few dozen fruits). I rushed back to the hotel to try them and - without a knife in the room - had to try my best to peel the tiny citrus and then squeeze to get the fruit - tiny orbs of citrus juice - to come out.

And it was a citrus unlike anything I’d had before with the texture of caviar or popping boba, but grapefruit flavored. This texture leads to a nickname of citrus caviar, but it’s primarily known as the finger lime. It’s a wild citrus that was never cultivated. It likely branched off from the citrus family millions of years ago and grows on the East coast of Australia in rainforests in Queensland and Northern New South Wales.

Aboriginal Australians - including the Bundjalung, Gumbainggir, Wakka Wakka, and Barunggam nations - used these fruits for tens of thousands of years both as food and medicine. The fruits grew plentifully and were traditionally gathered from the Australian rainforests. On the arrival of Europeans in 1788 and the British colonization of Australia, these rainforests were cleared with most of the finger lime trees destroyed. Colonization devastated and displaced indigenous Australians, down to the food they ate. By the 1900s finger lime trees survived only in private farms and in national parks.

For many decades the finger lime largely disappeared until the 1980s when some restaurants in Australia began experimenting with native ingredients - a trend that occurred around a similar time as America’s farm-to-table movement. This focus on native ingredients led directly to the rise of finger lime marmalades and preserves made by small producers. Between 2012 and 2020 the finger lime industry increased fivefold.

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Famed restaurants like Attica in Melbourne and Bennelong inside of the Sydney Opera House, have used finger limes in their dishes. Attica’s Chef Ben Shewry said that finger limes are “one of our truly Australian ingredients. By that I mean an ingredient that existed here for thousands of years and is a part of Aboriginal Australians’ culture before the English and every succession of migration since brought their own ingredients to Australia.”

Mid-way through my trip I wandered from a day spent on Bondi Beach to one of Australia’s most famous farm-to-table restaurants: Sean’s. The restaurant itself opened in 1993 when Australia was in the beginnings of the finger lime resurgence. In a beautifully quirky dining room with shell sconces and a menu scratched on a chalk board I ordered pipi surf clams with a finger lime garnish, at the strong recommendation from my waiter. The plate arrived with an unbelievable combination of the sour, crunchy citrus with the clams - the best thing I ate all week.

This exact pairing - shellfish garnished with finger lime pearls - was eaten by Aboriginal Australians thousands of years ago and then an ingredient nearly wiped out. And in the growing finger lime industry indigenous communities often aren’t represented. Only 2% of revenue in the growing native foods industry in Australia comes from indigenous communities. And the growth is often relegated to fine dining rather than everyday grocery stores. I couldn’t find the fruits in any of the many grocery store aisles (Coles, Harris Farm Markets or Woolworths) I strolled through. After my first taste on my first morning, I knew I needed to try them again at any cost.

On my final day in Australia I passed a farmer’s market in the trendy Potts Point neighborhood, spotting a small carton of finger limes - at a similarly expensive 10 Australian dollars. I bought a box of bright red fruits, opening one to snack on the rest of my walk to meet a friend for coffee. I proudly showed my acquisition thinking these were luxury, rare fruits. When I arrived my friend only laughed, telling me “I could have brought you some of these from my yard. They’re everywhere in Australia.”

Fruit Lore

Less than 24 jet lagged hours into a trip to Japan in December, I walked into the most important item on my to-do list: Sembikiya, Japan’s luxury fruit parlor. I’d heard about this expensive fruit palace and needed to see it for myself. Walking past the Christmas lights of Omotesando, I stepped into the parlor, standing face to face with the most beautiful fruit display I’d ever seen.

Melons behind glass, citrus encased in well wrapped plastic and apples in protecting nets greeted me. Pulling out my translation app to decide what to buy, the cashier walked over speaking very kindly to me in Japanese. I clumsily showed him my translation app saying that I was looking for the best citrus and he pointed to a saturated orange citrus. He showed me his translation app, which in English read “these are very special.”

5 minutes later I’d spent around 10,000 yen ($60ish dollars) and the most beautiful citrus I’d ever seen were wrapped up as if they were a Prada handbag. Grocery shopping if it were designed by LVMH. The most expensive of the bunch was the citrus he recommended, the Beni Madonna, and I’d never heard of it. My new friend had added a Sembikiya citrus catalog that explained the fruit in Japanese with some scribbled notes from him as well (also in Japanese).

Sembikiya wasn’t always the Bergdorf’s of fruit. In 1834 Benzo Ohshima founded a discount fruit store in Nihonbashi in Edo-period Tokyo. He came from a farming region and understood how to source fresh fruit to the growing city. Since at least the 14th century, though, fruit has been far more than just nutrition in Japanese culture. The freshest melons and mandarins were presented to ruling leaders and offered at Shinto shrines. Drawing on that culture, Ohshima’s children and grandchildren slowly pivoted the business, sourcing increasingly perfected fruits from Japan and abroad.

In 1887 they opened the first fruit restaurant, the predecessor to the fruit parlor I stepped into, with beautifully presented fruit as parfaits, sandwiches and as gifts. They became a favored destination for elites in Japan buying during the O-Seibo and O-Chugen gifting seasons. In doing so, they created a market for luxury fruit that farmers developed fruit for. And farmers went to increasing lengths to create differentiated, beautiful fruits fit for giving. Melons were given hats during growing to prevent sun damage, Fuji apples were grown in individual bags and a new type of citrus was trademarked to be blemish-free only.

After bringing the new fruit to my tiny Tokyo hotel room, I woke up very early the next morning. With some hesitation for its bold orange beauty, I peeled my Beni Madonna. On the first slice I was beside myself at how an orange could taste more like an orange than anything I’d had before. It was juicy, sweet and with a texture closer to a specialty dessert than a fruit. This orange I had never heard of before immediately proved to me why Sembikiya exists.

The Beni Madonna is proof that the premium fruit market reached Ehime - Japan’s fruit kingdom. By 1990 the citrus producing region where orange juice is piped in the taps of its capital Matsuyama was on the hunt for a new hit citrus. Researchers at the Ehime Fruit Tree Experiment Station crossed the beloved, sweet Nanka Mikan oranges with the tender fleshed Amakusa oranges. The result was a large, deep orange, super sweet orange with a unique jelly-like fruit.

It was developed over 15 years and trademarked in 2007 as Beni Madonna, Beni roughly translating as “dark red” and Madonna after a character in a beloved Ehime-set Japanese novel. To be considered a Beni Madonna it must meet strict taste and appearance standards. It’s designed for the premium market and fruit parlors, where they’re sold for gifting and served as a dessert, sliced with the skin as a cup. It’s especially luxurious for its fleeting nature - the season only lasts from November to December, exactly why the cashier recommended it to me. The most perfect fruit made only more perfect by how short lived it is.

It was the first new fruit I tried in a country famous for its perfected fruit and an entree into a world of fruit I’d never seen at home. Sembikiya built demand for seasonal, spectacular fruit that now trickles down to nearly all Japanese fruit. Every grocery store and 7/11 I stopped in (I stopped in many) also stocked attractive - if not up to Sembikiya standards - fruit.

But if you squint you see this culture beginning to come together in the US. The perfect Oishii Berry stocked in Erewhon’s pristine wellness shelves. The sumo citrus sitting in a beautiful wood crate at Meadow Lane’s tiktok fever dream of a grocery store. The beautiful box of Harry & David pears at Christmas. We want these fleeting delicious fruits. And as the Japanese realized some time ago, fruit is a perfect gift simply because it doesn’t last. When we can fill our homes with goods cheaply, fruit stands out precisely because it is enjoyed and then disappears.

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Pickings

@rosevlexamade an orange peel case for cuties 🧡 which fruit should i make next? #diy #fruit

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• This TikTok creator makes tiny fruit clutches, hollowing out fresh produce (specifically oranges, carrots and tomatoes), stitching on a zipper and filling it with tiny versions of the same produce. Spectacular fruit fashion better than anything on a runway

• Apple’s new social strategy includes a highlight - a real lemon wordlessly facetiming a real lime. Much like the fruit AI series, nothing captures our attention and imagination more than fruit.

If you enjoyed this please share this and the culture of fruit with your friends! See you next time.

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Fruit Lore

Tomorrow is the first day of April, which means we’ve officially hit Ojai Pixie Tangerine season. These little, bumpy, pale orange tangerines are super sweet with a hint of tartness. They’re only available a short time between late March and early May and they come from only one place, Ojai, California.

Ojai and its tangerines are foundational to my fruit & citrus obsession. A California road trip in 2021 included a stop at one of Ojai’s mom and pop grocers (chain stores are banned by a city ordinance), where I bought a brown bag of pixies. Between impatience and hunger, I stood on the street, outside of the rental car, peeling and downing 3 of these sweet citrus, using a water bottle to wash the juice off my fingers and wrists.

That night in another citrus dotted Southern California town (Santa Barbara) I googled the - to me surprising - history of citrus, while sipping a lemon cocktail and waiting for my partner to come back from the bathroom. And 5 years later here we are with this newsletter.

Ojai Pixie Tangerines are that special, but they were originally rejected. Like much of American citrus, they trace back to the University of California Riverside’s Citrus Research Center. In 1927 Howard Frost pollinated a Kincy Mandarin with another, now unknown, citrus parent. And then they didn’t go anywhere for decades until 1965 when they were released after significant testing.They were largely dismissed as a “backyard tree” because the tree takes up to 8 years to fruit and has a short spring harvest outside of the core citrus season. That was until Ojai.

90-minutes northwest of LA, Ojai is a vision of a certain old California. Today it has less than 8,000 people, but since the 1920s artists, authors and those seeking an alternative or spiritual scene have been attracted to the town. By the time UCR released the pixie tangerine the city had a farm to table restaurant (before the term existed), a quirky outdoor bookstore and a slow-growth agenda that meant it rejected consumerism in favor of a slower, more local culture. Ojai represents an American counter-cultural ideal that can now only be found in pockets of the country.

Frank Noyes, an Ojai citrus farmer, planted some pixie tangerine trees from UCR tests. The Ojai Valley is a unique east-west valley with a microclimate of hot summers, mild winters and fog only in June; this climate resulted in a transformed pixie tangerine that was sweeter and juicier than those in Riverside. By the 80s two farmers - Jim Churchill and Tony Thacher - both took notice and began planting the pixies.

Around the same time the California farm-to-table movement was just taking shape and the Ojai pixies were sent to the influential Monterey Market in Berkeley where they were discovered by Alice Waters - the famed mother of California cuisine. At her iconic Chez Panisse restaurant she served the fruit as a dessert on its own, unadorned, called simply “Jim Churchill’s Pixie Tangerine.” A sweet treat on its own needing neither a descriptor, nor a scoop of ice cream. With Waters’ cosign it took off as one of California’s most famous citrus.

But the pixie tangerine remains inseparable from Ojai - a fruit that was shaped by the valley’s climate and counter-consumerism and now shapes the culture of the town. In April Ojai orbits around the tangerine with festivals, farmers markets, pixie spa treatments, pixie margaritas and pixie hotel packages. And, of course, visits to the 50+ local farmers making up the Ojai Pixie Growers Association. All of the Ojai Pixie Tangerines are grown by these farmers.

Ojai innately links fruit and culture - the exact mix that swept me up with my first taste of the super sweet, slightly tart pixie tangerine 5 years ago.

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Pickings

• This fruit tour of Columbia is a tropical fruit dream and the single best bit of fruit tourism I’ve seen. Market and grocery store tourism is already well documented and fruit-specific tourism fits well into that trend.

• Strawberry season is just kicking off, a real sign of spring. While they don’t peak until a bit later in the season we’re just seeing the beginnings of what’s to come with some cherries and apricots coming into season as well.

• This weekend at The Whitney I saw Roy Lichtenstein’s Still Life with Crystal Bowl, a pop art depiction of the fruit bowl, the most universal and timeless subject in all of art.

Thanks for reading kumquat! If you love fruit and culture as much as I have since eating a pixie tangerine in an Ojai parking lot, I’d love it if you would share the newsletter. Happy pickings!

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This Week in kumquat: the business spat behind Cutie and Halo mandarins…fruit AI…and the Disney World of fruit.

Fruit Lore

Everyone has an opinion about Cuties and Halos, the ubiquitous netted bags of fruit with smiling logos. These are actually a brand name for multiple types of mandarin and the story behind them includes ancient China, UC Riverside and a corporate America dispute.

Mandarins are one of the three original citrus - alongside citron and pomelo. Mandarins come from Southern China and the first records we have of them come from 2200 BC. They took their time to become a global force, making their way to Europe in the early 1800s, one of the last major citrus to do so. They were first brought to the Americas in the 1840s by an Italian diplomat in New Orleans and then quickly made their way to the citrus hubs of Florida and California.

Mandarin’s dominance in the US stems from one place…The University of California Riverside. It was first established as the UC Citrus Experiment Station in 1907, following California’s introduction of the country’s first navel orange trees. That spurred a booming industry in the state, but leading citrus growers lobbied the University of California system to establish a citrus research lab to stave off competition from Florida and abroad. It was established and began to grow in influence, long before the university was founded in the 1950s.

Many mandarins resulted from the UCR Citrus Growing Program, including the Tango, the Gold Nugget, the Murcott and the Shasta Gold. Critically many of these varieties reduced the number of seeds in each mandarin (often using radiation), which made them much more desirable.

This seedlessness led to one of the most recognizable fruit brands in the country when two growers, Sun Pacific and Paramount Citrus (associated with the Wonderful Company, which is behind Fiji Water), came together to build a new grocery store brand - Cuties. They hit shelves in 2004 and became a massive success.

Anyone in school during this time remembers these lunchbox staples that were easy to peel and seedless. But importantly, they were only a brand name, not a particular type of mandarin. This was part of the success, the brand stays year round while the actual fruit swaps out depending on the season (often between clementines, murcotts and tango mandarins). So these fruits will taste dramatically different from bag to bag.

By 2013 the success resulted in major business disputes between the two citrus companies about how they wanted to expand. It reached a boiling point in May when the partnership dissolved and Sun Pacific acquired full ownership of the Cutie name. But Paramount Citrus, backed by The Wonderful Company, made a counter move. With more citrus acreage and a massive marketing machine they launch the Halo brand by the fall. And by 2019 a grower associated with Paramount broke off to found Peelz, a third major mandarin brand.

Fruit in America is deeply tied up with branding and the emotional connection that comes with it, which is a challenge because fruit is so seasonal. Establishing brands that transcend a specific species of fruit decouples our understanding of the exact type of mandarin we’re eating, leading us to have sometimes unsatisfying experiences.

I recently posted about Halos & Cuties on Tik Tok and my comments were filled with observations that these oranges didn’t taste like they used to. And that’s simply because we were all tasting different things to begin with.

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Pickings

• Fruit Love Island: this past week drama-filled fruit AI videos flooded Tik Tok and Instagram quickly racking up millions of views. Most of them were stories of fruit cheating on each other with the most viral a fruit version of Love Island. It’s no coincidence to me that one of AI’s biggest breakouts in culture has to do with fruit, something with high global recognizability and just enough whimsy.

In Season

In November 1959 a struggling farmer set up a stand on a street corner in Homestead, Florida to sell his cucumber crop, bringing his 6-year old son Robert with him to help sell. No one stopped. That night he painted a sign to put in front of the stand the next day. It read “Robert is Here.” Sales picked up that day and 66 years later Robert Is Here is a beloved Miami-Dade County farm stand that people travel miles for - including me.

Arriving at the stand, I saw the giant white letters of Robert is Here, the long line for fresh fruit smoothies and the piles and piles of fruit both familiar and new. And Robert Moehling, now in his 70s, was behind the cash register cutting up fruit and talking to customers. I ordered a soursop smoothie and began to shop, picking up guavas, mamey sapote, tropical caimito, kumquats and Jamaican pomelo. I also did stop to marvel at the $42 turquoise Emu eggs on sale.

At the checkout, Robert explained the taste of each fruit in just a few words: “tastes like a pear with cinnamon, “this is like a sweet melon pudding,” or “a sour candy.” He recommended a sapodilla and cut it up for us to try. Around back as we waited for our smoothies, I strolled a makers market and listened to some live music. I spent $90, worth every penny.

This was a fruit experience really without an equivalent anywhere in the country. This is in part due to its location, Homestead sits in the Redland in Florida, just out of Miami. It’s a super productive agricultural region and its unique climate and soil makes it one of the few places in the continental US where tropical fruit grows at any sort of scale. Most of the Robert Is Here fruit comes straight from their farms or farms nearby. Much of the tropical fruit can’t be shipped, so it’s hard to find elsewhere. South Florida also stays warm year round and can offer a wide variety of fruits at any season.

But we do have versions of this around the country: apple picking, Hamptons farm stands, Ojai tangerine farms, berry picking around the Great Lakes. These experiences are within reach, but often short lasting or lacking an always-on availability. But we’re certainly willing to go to places that give us a chance to buy seasonal, locally grown produce for maximum flavor, while getting enough of an experience to make the travel worth it.

Robert is keenly aware of this, his stand is a founding member of the Florida Agritourism Association. He knows that fruit can be a destination unto itself by building something more than just a farm stand - a place that offers you somewhere to buy fruit, but also to stay a while, have a smoothie and listen to music. We need more Robert’s, standing behind a counter in his 70s, cutting up sapodilla and talking about why you should love fruit.

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This week: Buenos Aires fruterías and America’s specialty fruit stores…the way the sumo citrus is a sign of cultural change…the evolving concept of the fruit bowl

Fruit Lore

2 months into Sumo citrus season and no doubt you’ve seen these large, wrinkly citrus with the trademark knob on top. And if you haven’t seen them on your grocery shelf they’ve crossed your screen many times. Sumo Citrus is a rare fruit phenomenon in the United States, commanding high prices and bearing a consumer urgency for its short 3-ish month growing season. They’re loved for a sweet, distinct flavor and ease of peeling.

The Sumo Citrus, also known as Dekopon, is a cross between the kiyomi orange and the ponkan. It originated in Japan in 1972 at a Nagasaki Prefecture fruit experiment station, but was rejected due to what was considered an unsightly knob. In the 80s a grower discovered that if left out longer the fruits became sweeter, resulting in the oranges hitting the market in the 1990s. In Japan dekopon are grown with precision and perfected, leading to their status as a luxury (and expensive) fruit for gifting. The citrus traveled to Jeju Island in South Korea where it is beloved and known as Hallabong.

US growers also took notice and a few attempted to smuggle them out of Japan - much like Robert Fortune’s kumquat espionage. In 1998 Brad Stark Jr. finally legally imported them to California. But they didn’t come to market until 2011 when it was renamed Sumo after the resemblance to Japanese sumo wrestler’s topknot and was released initially to Whole Foods nationally and among California specific grocery stores.

National prominence didn’t come until 2018 where the Sumo rode the rising tide of influencers who took note of the eye-catching, easy to eat citrus. By 2019 it had become a full blown trend and today among a certain internet set it’s a heralded time at the grocery store as festive as the Christmas season. The brand has also recently extended into partnerships like a Sumo-tinged olive oil.

The Sumo is the foremost example of America’s budding taste for luxury fruits. The price is high, often $4 or more for one single fruit, largely driven by the labor intensive process needed to grow them. It also doesn’t hurt that it’s available only for a short time in the year (we’re almost at the end of the season which runs to April).

The widespread popularity of the Sumo demonstrates a real shift in America’s culture around fruit. Sumo posts on the internet say that you have an especially refined taste that they won’t settle for a navel orange. Fruit, and posting about fruit, now signal a type of taste and curation usually reserved for non-perishable formats. We’re already seeing the next Sumos coming along with Oishii berry and the pink pineapple being a very recent example of this. To Americans now fruit with a story, limited nature and - crucially - shareability signify refinement and ultimately lead to virality.

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Pickings

• Robert is Here is the most charming fruit stand I’ve ever been to with types of tropical fruit that you likely won’t find elsewhere. I’ll certainly be writing more about this, but make sure you go if you’re near Miami.

• Beautiful fruit has always been home decor, just ask the Dutch masters, but we’re looking for more interesting ways to display them and there’s a ceramicist on TikTok reinventing what displaying fruits can be (I want one).

• The newest dessert trend is most certainly the Aiko Garden Fruit Bucket with tiny fruit shaped and chocolate covered ice cream. Increasingly, the ticket to virality with desserts almost exclusively runs through fruits - just ask Aurora LA about their fruit shaped cakes.

In Season

Over the weekend a conversation kicked off on TikTok about fruterías and specialty stores. The origin is a video from a travel creator showcasing the specialty stores of Spain that she claims don’t exist in the US. Immediately, other videos and comments rightfully pointed out that the US does have fruit stands and farmers markets. Both the video and reaction, though, show our protectiveness and desire for more real everyday spaces that give us a daily ritual (florists, butchers and, of course, fruit stores).

I myself am not immune to the call of an overseas fruit store. A few weekends ago in Buenos Aires I became obsessed with the frutería stores on nearly every corner. These were brick and mortar spaces run by families selling seasonal produce with prices that change with them. With these stores that dotted almost every block I imagined the romance of a slow life strolling into a real place with four walls where the store owner, who knows you well, already has the first apricots of the season picked out for you.

It is not lost on me that this isn’t so far from my life in New York: going to the farmers market weekly, regularly stopping by the fruit stand on my corner and going to Flushing to buy beautifully packaged oranges. The difference was a call to something else, fruit as a part of social fabric and daily life across the city. Real spaces that are just as much communal as they are about fresh produce: carving out a place in your neighborhood where you’re guaranteed to find fresh and maybe new fruit.

These stores were built by waves of immigrants bringing their culture around fruit with them from Italian and Jewish produce carts of the 1900s to the Korean greengrocers of the 1970s. It’s the same story as Argentina, where Italian immigrants first brought the frutería and more recent Bolivian communities carried it forward.

The fruit & vegetable store used to be a regular part of American life, but it got replaced by the more efficient supermarket beginning in the 1930s. Around this same time New York City cracked down on produce push carts. Today the number of NYC permits for fruit and vegetable stands available is still 1,000 via the Green Cart program. But only around 150 are officially claimed due to a bureaucratic process that makes them almost impossible to get in practice. The rest of the carts in the city face fines or risk being shut down without a permit.

We’re craving spaces with a point of view that go beyond the hyper efficiency of a Whole Foods, filled by specialty stores. And it’s easy to see why we’re protective when TikTok users dismiss neighborhood institutions: independent grocery stores on the whole across the country are declining.

In 2026 there is no shortage of interest in new, unique and seasonal produce and it’s why farmers market hauls and apple picking trips are all over our feeds. What we lack right now is the regular, ritualistic infrastructure to support these emerging tastes in America. We already have the model in our cities and in our history. It’s time to push for the fruit store we deserve: one where you can just as easily discover the next Sumo citrus as you can become a regular for your bananas that week.

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Thank you for reading the second edition of kumquat - I’m so glad you’re here. I’d love it if you shared this or let me know what you think of all this fruit.

kumquat is a newsletter about the cultural life of fruit and how it interplays with business, history, fashion, art, media and - of course - food. When you’re biting into an apple you’re biting into something that’s driven economics, science and culture for centuries. If you’re as obsessed with fruit as me follow along for the most seasonal fruits and their cultural long tail.

This week: The Sunshine State’s citrus on the decline, how a souvenir store is keeping the culture alive…fruit in fashion’s SS’26…and the espionage history of the Kumquat.

Fruit Index - Kumquats

Kumquats are EXTREMELY underrated fruits with a long history and a connection to espionage.

They’re small, almost cherry tomato shaped citrus fruits ranging in color from a deep orange to a greenish blush to an almost red color. Most importantly, kumquats can be eaten whole with the rind and all, which is why they’re my favorite citrus to eat fresh. Kumquats sometimes called an inside out orange because the rind (outside) is very sweet, almost candy-like while the inside is very sour. When eaten together they balance out.

Kumquats originate in Southern China where they’ve been a deep part of culture there for some time. The name likely comes from a Cantonese word meaning golden orange. They first appeared in writing around the 12th century, but have been cultivated in China, Japan and Southeast Asia likely thousands of years. In China they were particularly valued as ornamental plants, but also play a big role in Lunar New Year (which was this month), symbolizing prosperity. And in Japan on New Year it’s traditional to eat candied kumquat for good luck. They’ve also historically been used in medicine as they contain really high amounts of vitamin c.

They made their way to Europe in 1846 from Robert Fortune, a Scottish botanist. Fortune is most famous for his role in “The Great British Tea Heist.” He was working for the British East India Company, which was looking to bring tea from China to India. At the time foreigners were not permitted to buy tea plants in China, so he smuggled hundreds of tea plants out of the country using a Wardian case, which was an early type of terrarium. The kumquats were essentially a bonus, while Fortune was in China to steal an empire’s tea secrets.

From Europe they eventually made their way to North America where they took root in Florida and California and became a big part of the culture in both. In California they’re extremely popular with chefs in California cuisine. My first experience with kumquat was at a Santa Barbara restaurant where thinly sliced played a starring role on a salad. Kumquats are also beloved in Florida where in Dade City there is an annual January kumquat festival with hundreds of vendors…I wish I could have gone this year.

Kumquats are still quite untapped in the popular imagination of fruit, at least in the US. Outside of Florida and California they can be a bit hard to source at grocery stores. But these tiny, fully edible bursts of vitamin c feel ripe to be a big part of culture to come.

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Pickings

Fruit finds over the last few weeks

Citarella is stocking sorrento lemons, which I’ve never seen in the US. Worth checking out if you’re in the New York area.

Jacquemus released an incredible pair of orange sneakers (complete with a leaf). It follows the luxury fashion fruit inspiration we’ve seen from Louis Vuitton and Loewe.

I was just in Buenos Aires (more to come on that soon) where I became obsessed with the juice brand Estancia Los Naranjos. The lemon, mint and ginger juice is incredible.

In Season

When visiting Orlando I was determined to see an orange grove and pick my own Florida oranges in citrus season. Growing up, family vacations meant miles and miles of groves on the sides of highways, but these are a less common site now. I expected the equivalent of upstate New York’s apple picking culture, but that doesn’t really exist with Florida’s declining industry.

Citrus production in Florida has declined 90% in recent decades and declined 30% in 2025, largely due to citrus greening disease, but also driven by more frequent hurricanes from climate change and difficult economic realities for those growing it.

Enter Orange World - not an orange grove, but the “World’s Largest Orange” - and it combines Florida’s tourist kitsch with its citrus history. It’s located in Kissimmee and was opened by Eli Sfassie as a gas station and gift shop in 1971 to coincide with the opening of Disney World just down the road. In 1988 it was converted to look like a giant 60 foot tall orange and became an unmistakable landmark in Central Florida.

Today it’s a preserver of Florida citrus, selling only Florida grown fruits out front (you can also order crates of citrus to anywhere in the country), alongside souvenirs of orange perfume, citrus candles and (of course) t-shirts. They also sell the citrus trees themselves to encourage local planting of these trees.

The store had fresh squeezed orange juice, which is always recommended for its light and fresh flavor, much different than the sugary grocery store kind.

I picked up citrus themed candles and a citrus peeler that’s changed my life, but the real stars were the fruits. I was able to get Florida tangelos, cara cara oranges and pomelos. Increasingly the site of Florida oranges in the grocery are becoming a rarity with citrus more common from California or Mexico, so my bag of fruit carried on the plane were a treat.

Oranges play a real role in the economy and in the popular imagination of the Sunshine State. And as Florida’s citrus declines there’s a real question of how the state positions itself when a key part of its identity is in crisis.

And Orlando’s theme park ubiquity offers a large, orange shaped answer. Tourism has become a catch all for Florida and it’s only fitting that it could swoop in to prop up the state’s citrus identity. Perhaps a focus on orange-tourism will lead to a real turnaround for the citrus industry in the state.

Thank you for reading the first edition of kumquat - I’m so glad you’re here. I’d love to hear from you about your thoughts on the first issue and what you’d like to hear more of.

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