0:01

Hello! It's Dylan. And.

0:03

Today. His. Birthday

0:05

happier if they everybody. And actually

0:07

Friday is Arbor Day! And.

0:09

So we figured. What? Better

0:12

thing to do. Than. Spend

0:14

this week. Celebrating.

0:16

The world's incredible and wonderous trees.

0:18

We love trees here about Obscura

0:20

and we're going to bring you

0:22

a bunch of stories about them.

0:24

Were gonna have stories about a

0:27

disgruntled plant, explore about a strange

0:29

Australian phenomenon involving people emailing trees,

0:31

and we've begun to branch out

0:33

a little bit. Wanna. Talk

0:36

about. Killer. Trees The

0:38

dark side of trees with

0:40

none other than writer Mary

0:43

Roach. There's a lot to look forward

0:45

to during this week. Here's. Today's episode.

0:54

The most important part of say a thing as smelling

0:56

cel before you eat are you putting thing in your

0:58

mouth he wouldn't be how close each such as has

1:00

the it's your know the for you can snipe. This.

1:02

Is maybe make which. Mandy is a

1:05

professional taster and she's the author of

1:07

the book How to Taste. I've

1:09

ever. I never throw my citrus before I eat

1:11

it. You gotta throw everything birth

1:14

and fell import level and like the anti lead.

1:16

Glad that you're ever having coffee that to take

1:18

the lead off Stevens night before he has said

1:20

so important. Recently,

1:24

Mandy and I met up on

1:26

a Zoom call to do a

1:28

little bit of a joint taste

1:30

test. We had lemons and Clementine

1:32

set out in front of us

1:34

and a mission to taste them

1:36

carefully. Yeah, what should we eat

1:38

first? I do it, Clementine. Maybe

1:40

a little more subtle. Thunder? I'm going to go

1:43

for that one breath. You can feel like the

1:45

thinner thinner peel going on is less protection of

1:47

the acid inside. The I. Always

1:53

delicious. Definitely. Get

1:55

a little or that fucker in the back to you have

1:57

that at all. that a little tired but nothing. Yeah,

2:00

yeah, Bourke wrote nice I could see his

2:02

by the like. Millions are

2:04

you tonight? So many of them are

2:06

right now. Let's let's do the lemon.

2:08

Let's London son Yeah this is family

2:11

lives in he can how the thick

2:13

thick peel going on I didn't know

2:15

about with the name of I just

2:17

think of it as like the standard

2:19

lemon yeah addresses for one another going

2:21

to be in a are either one

2:23

man or a list and lemon pretty

2:25

much as I know. It's not. now.

2:27

I like my breasts. Yeah, yes, I thought of

2:29

going to be like, you know when you get

2:31

that really far. slight yup on the painful

2:34

tucker but it's really it's pretty printed

2:36

book. As you can tell, We're

2:39

going to be talking about citrus and we're

2:41

going to be talking about. One.

2:43

Particular citrus that using a weird way

2:45

kind of a combination of these two.

2:48

Yeah. We're we're talking about a fruit today that

2:50

kind of falls right between these two fruits. And

2:52

ah, it's the Meyer Lemon, which is a little

2:54

bit hard to find when it's off season. And

2:57

grocery stores. As we discovered. That

3:00

were written in assessing. I guess you could try to play a

3:02

little. Bit of each fruit into our mountain

3:04

the meantime and C S. C for

3:06

creating that Meyer Lemon extent I think of

3:08

the. Like two thirds lead in one

3:11

third man for and suggest that the

3:13

axle tastes are trying to recreate that

3:15

if ominous that are Clementine flies on

3:17

my lemon and and like by the

3:19

whole thing those our this may or

3:21

may not or. A

3:25

pretty good actually don't actually know that balancing

3:27

that that means or are they had some

3:29

things in a balance and some of the

3:31

partners that. That's a

3:34

pretty good approximation of be a little

3:36

that's not would go on the island.

3:38

I gotta get my hands of the

3:40

fire. At. I.

3:49

Have drawn threats and this is Alice.

3:51

obscure up a celebration of the world

3:53

strange, incredible and wonder if places me

3:55

undies. Not just professional taste or but

3:58

also an expert on the history. of

4:00

the Meyer lemon. Mandy wrote this incredible

4:03

story for Alison Skira about the Meyer

4:05

lemon. So we are gonna do a

4:07

deep dive into the lemon,

4:09

the eccentric plant explorer

4:12

discovered it and accidentally

4:14

released this seemingly unstoppable

4:16

virus causing this very

4:18

real mid-century citrus panic.

4:21

That is all after this.

4:25

I'm gonna put my lemons and I'm gonna put these on the

4:27

floor. I don't know if I'm

4:30

100% gonna knock them over. Yeah. When

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Yours. Maybe

5:46

we should talk about the reputation of

5:48

the Meyer lemon. It sort of

5:50

has this aura of like

5:52

specialness about it. You see it very clearly called

5:54

out on menus. Like if you're using a Meyer

5:57

lemon, no one ever just says lemon. They're like,

5:59

oh, it's this. We're going Meyer lemons.

6:01

Why does it have that kind of like? Specialness

6:04

to it two things make it really

6:06

special one is a very very thin keel So you

6:08

as a grocery store lemon you might see that big

6:11

white kiss around the citrus separating it

6:13

from the rind kind of the zest

6:15

Of the lemon. Yeah, my lemon doesn't really

6:17

have that separation So you don't have all that bitterness in there

6:19

You have that really fresh beautiful zest

6:21

that has this special kind of

6:24

rose floral notes that typical

6:26

grocery store lemons don't have and then You get right

6:28

into the flesh of the lemon. So if you really

6:30

wanted to you could just bite into a Meyer lemon

6:34

Right through the peel and especially if it's not waxed

6:37

You've done are you just like walking around eating

6:39

Meyer lemons like apples? I

6:42

have done it. Yes And

6:44

it's great. Yeah, that's why you can do it on a

6:46

tart too If you want to like them preserve it You

6:48

just don't have all that bitterness of the piss and then

6:50

the flesh is also just a little bit sweeter a little

6:52

bit less Less

6:55

tart listener You may have noted

6:57

that we were not taste testing

6:59

a Meyer lemon because despite our

7:01

producer Amanda's Most rigorous

7:03

efforts to find and source Meyer

7:05

lemons near us on the East

7:08

Coast It was effectively

7:10

impossible. Why are they so hard to

7:12

find? So during very narrow

7:14

seasons, you can sometimes find them here in

7:16

New York But because of that really thin

7:19

keel, they're very easy to damage and bruise And

7:21

yeah, they'll get those big ugly bruises and we

7:23

know there's one thing we know about grocery stores

7:25

It's that they're not gonna be selling a bruised

7:27

fruit. So it's not always worth it for them

7:29

to bring them out here and They

7:33

can be a lot more expensive to But

7:37

there's something else unusual about the Meyer

7:39

lemon unlike the other fruits and vegetables

7:41

in the grocery store It's

7:43

named after a guy Frank Meyer.

7:46

I Went to a

7:48

period where I was like pretty obsessed with Frank

7:50

Meyer. He's like this

7:52

classic adventurer type He's always wearing

7:54

this gigantic fur hat big boots

7:57

and in the early 1900s Frank worked

8:00

for the US Department of Agriculture, the

8:02

USDA. And he

8:04

had a very unusual gig there.

8:07

I mean, Frank Meyer, I think, has the coolest job

8:09

title. I've come across in research in a

8:11

long time, which they just called him plants

8:13

explorer, Frank Meyer. But

8:15

basically, he was sent out to

8:18

bring new fruits, vegetables, citrus plants

8:20

from Asia to America. He would go on

8:23

these long trips where he'd be collecting samples,

8:25

collecting seeds. He'd cataloged, I think it was

8:27

over 2,500 different new species that

8:29

we weren't aware of in the US, brought

8:32

back things like different kinds of pears,

8:34

all different kinds of citrus. He traveled

8:36

the world cataloging plants, sending back his

8:38

notebooks are amazing to read.

8:41

Frank was, of course, not really discovering

8:43

these plants. They were very

8:46

well known all over Asia. But

8:48

what he was doing was finding them and

8:50

introducing them to the United States. And

8:52

the lemon that would later be named after him,

8:55

that he first came across in the summer of

8:57

1908. It

8:59

was just outside of Beijing. He

9:02

said that it was an incredible lemon, that it was

9:04

sweeter, it was something better. It was in a lot

9:06

of homes there in China. And

9:08

those were the letters that he wrote back to

9:10

the USDA before he was able to send seeds

9:12

and samples. So definitely knew that

9:14

it was something special, but he was discovering a lot

9:16

of special things at the time. So I don't know

9:19

that he knew how long its legacy would be. He

9:21

also seemed like this, just like personally,

9:24

like this kind of complex,

9:27

romantic, sometimes kind of dark character.

9:30

A lot of his notebooks are

9:32

public knowledge. They're all published on

9:35

the USDA website. And

9:37

you can really track his moods through

9:39

these letters. He's talking about things like

9:41

pears and berries and things

9:43

like that. But he's also talking about his

9:46

loneliness or that he thinks the locals

9:48

in certain towns don't like him and other towns they

9:50

do. Some people are very helpful to

9:52

him, helping him collect things, helping him ship things.

9:54

Other people are kind of trying to push him

9:56

out of their area. Some People are

9:58

fascinated by him. Some people are... a little

10:01

afraid of men and he he takes all

10:03

of that feedback emotionally. Very Ah, Sperry

10:05

personally and definitely race without them.

10:07

The same way he writes that his emotions and

10:10

toward the end of. His travels you can

10:12

start to see yeah some and loneliness

10:14

i'm i'm not were diagnosed anyone but

10:16

like to them depressive. Thoughts crawling in

10:18

us about what what his works doing?

10:21

Does anyone care what he's doing? Things

10:23

like that. He kind

10:25

of his writing. Letters from at the time

10:27

that he's feeling that sentence and sign

10:29

on his feeling unwell com he's going

10:31

to these small towns. I'm the what

10:33

we see it in the know. it's

10:35

our job you things leading up to

10:37

him being very lonely not. Not feeling

10:40

like he has this is filling

10:42

on life projects in. Any more.

10:45

To give you an idea of his

10:47

mindset owner reduce the person of one

10:50

letter that he sent his boss view

10:52

as be a it's dated May Eighteen

10:54

Nineteen eighteen anyone. Since passing through these

10:56

villages that have burned down how they

10:58

were having difficulty getting food. And

11:01

then he writes the somewhat

11:03

mysterious kind of was nihilistic

11:06

passage he writes. It

11:09

often seems that we do not leave ourselves

11:11

any longer, but that we are being whipped.

11:13

Uncontrollable forces seem to be

11:15

at work among humanity and final

11:18

results or possibly purposes or not

11:20

being revealed as yeah. That.

11:23

Is for so far as I can look

11:25

into this whole i can a cataclysm. In.

11:28

Fact out that are turns out to be his last.

11:31

There's reports of him falling off the

11:34

boat a Sicilian. the Us sale at

11:36

the government reports are that's it, was

11:38

like a boating accident and then yeah,

11:41

he kind of washes up somewhere along

11:43

the river. It's very mysterious. Sad

11:46

kind of lose any other that

11:48

yeah he. Something. Happened.

11:51

No one really knows exactly what. Knew.

11:59

Him said. dies in 1918.

12:02

But the lemon lives on. And then by

12:04

the 1930s, it seems like it's sort of

12:06

starting to really spread, you

12:08

know, especially across California. Is that is that

12:10

kind of the right timeline of this? Yeah,

12:13

if you look up the like newspaper ads and

12:15

things like that, it's pretty fun. There's giveaways

12:17

of like get a free Meyer lemon tree

12:20

when you buy something in the spring. California

12:22

starts planting Meyer lemon trees on

12:25

their medians and in between

12:27

like a lot and things like that because they're

12:29

beautiful, they grow pretty well. Yeah, they're trying to

12:31

make it this California citrus thing. So it's really,

12:33

it's fun to look through some of those old

12:35

newspapers and just see lemon recipes,

12:37

free lemon trees, how to take care

12:39

of your lemon trees is a lot

12:41

of columns like that. And then yeah,

12:43

California actively planting their own

12:45

Meyer lemon trees in public spaces. But

12:49

there is a real problem about that

12:51

there is a kind of ticking time

12:53

bomb inside of these plants. So what

12:56

is this what is this citrus plant

12:58

hiding? It's a non symptomatic

13:00

carrier of quick decline citrus disease,

13:02

I can act in days

13:04

and just absolutely decimates other

13:06

citrus plants. So there

13:09

was huge blight happening in California

13:11

citrus and they couldn't figure out

13:13

what was going wrong, you know, just

13:15

orange groves just absolutely declining to quick

13:17

decline disease and days, weeks. Where

13:20

is this disease coming from? And

13:22

it's in every Californian's backyard or

13:24

living room in these non symptomatic

13:27

Meyer lemon trees, right? They end

13:29

up being the like perfect stealth

13:32

agent of death because they look

13:34

healthy and well and they're being

13:36

planted all over the place.

13:39

But then their disease is carried

13:42

it's like spread by by aphids

13:44

or something. Yeah, the bugs that carry it

13:47

and Asian citrus in

13:49

China had built up resistance to

13:51

it and it was fine. But yeah,

13:53

when it got into our American citrus,

13:55

especially oranges was the big issue. The

13:58

aphids would get on the plant. plants and just

14:00

immediately they'd be declining and within

14:03

days trees would be dead. How

14:05

big a deal was this? How

14:07

worried were people? It was a big

14:10

enough deal that it was the first ever international

14:12

gathering of citrus scientists and experts

14:14

to try to fight this. It

14:16

was the reason the International Organization

14:18

of Citrus Biologists was created

14:20

that still exists trying

14:23

to come up with a multi-prong plan

14:25

both of how to

14:27

save American citrus but also

14:29

protect other countries because the Meyer lemon was

14:31

making its way down to South America. There

14:33

was reports in Africa of the same things

14:36

happening. So they wanted to get an international

14:38

group together to figure out how far this

14:40

had gone and how they could prevent it.

14:42

It got quite intense. Like the

14:44

US government got involved. It's

14:46

like they start these big programs. What were some of

14:48

the things they were doing to try and get

14:52

rid of this Meyer lemon that they had now

14:54

spread all over the place? They were literally sending

14:56

people to knock on doors and if

14:59

they saw Meyer lemon trees and they were coming back next week and

15:01

if that tree is still here, we're going to forcibly take

15:04

it and things like that. On

15:09

one hand the scientists were working like crazy to

15:11

try to breed this gene out of

15:13

Meyer lemons and then

15:15

on the ground they were enlisting police

15:18

forces, people from city hall, tell on

15:21

your neighbors if you see Meyer lemon tree. They

15:23

were obviously digging up all those public Meyer

15:25

lemon trees and really

15:27

going out of their way to get them out

15:30

of their counties. And

15:32

of course when anything like that happens and

15:35

someone's knocking at your door trying to take

15:37

your lemon tree, all of a sudden there's

15:39

another faction that rises up that's like my

15:41

rights, my lemon tree, my backyard kind of

15:43

thing. So some of the little city hall

15:45

debates that were published in newspapers are just

15:48

insane in the way that people

15:50

wanted to send their rights to

15:52

poison local trees I

15:54

guess. of

16:00

California Riverside came up with an

16:03

answer, an alternative. They bred a new

16:05

Meyer lemon tree called the improved Meyer

16:07

lemon. Like if you're looking

16:10

to buy a citrus tree online, you'll

16:12

notice that they're all called improved Meyer

16:14

lemon. You can't purchase the original genetics

16:16

of Meyer lemon anywhere in the U.S.

16:25

I'm curious about you. How did you get

16:28

interested in the story of the Meyer lemon?

16:30

Why did you want to know more about

16:32

it? Yeah, so I

16:35

traveled through the many layers of

16:37

the Cicerone certification program, which is

16:39

basically sommelier, but for beer. And to

16:42

get to Master Cicerone, you have to be able

16:44

to identify 32 different

16:46

compounds just by scent and taste. So

16:48

they're different off flavors in beer. So

16:50

you have to go through really a

16:53

whole certification process to learn these flavors,

16:55

be able to blind identify them. I was

16:57

a longtime Meyer lemon lover, and I was hoping when I

17:00

was doing research for my book, How

17:02

to Taste, there was like some chemical

17:04

compound in the Meyer lemon that was

17:06

what made it so different from a

17:08

standard lemon. So I was looking through

17:10

all the scientific papers and all you

17:12

can find is like scientific papers about

17:14

how to eradicate Meyer lemons, how they're

17:17

full of disease, how to get them out of

17:19

the country. So I never found

17:21

the compound, it just seems to be a different

17:23

balance of compounds. So

17:25

there is no quick, easy chemical

17:28

shortcut to get that perfect,

17:30

not too tart, slightly floral, complex

17:32

Meyer lemon taste. But luckily,

17:34

if you can't find them at the grocery store

17:36

near you, Mandy says you can definitely try growing

17:39

them on your own. That is how they got

17:41

popular initially. They're pretty resilient. They're much better than

17:43

something like a lime tree or a lot of

17:45

people try to grow yuzu as well at home.

17:48

Riverside actually has a list that they recommend

17:51

of places that are not going to sell

17:53

you an almost dead tree. Because

17:56

that's the big problem is not that they'll give you, you

17:58

know, any citrus to the such as that they're

18:00

not well taken care of before they end up in your home

18:02

and you'll never get a lemon from them. Mandy

18:06

Naglitz is the author of How to Taste,

18:09

a Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life.

18:12

She is also a certified taster

18:14

and award-winning home brewer. Thanks, Mandy.

18:16

As a terrible home brewer, I'm

18:18

very impressed. I've done it three

18:20

times. It was fine, but no

18:22

one's writing to anybody about the

18:24

things that I've heard. Thank

18:27

you for having me. It's always fun to talk about Frank

18:29

and his many adventures. Our

18:46

podcast is a co-production of Atlas

18:48

Obscura and Stitcher Studios. This

18:50

episode was produced by Amanda

18:53

McGowan, Julia Russo. The production

18:55

team includes Doug Baldinger, Chris

18:58

Naka, Camille Stanley, Manolo Morales,

19:00

Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Johanna Mayer.

19:02

Our technical director is Casey

19:05

Holford. This episode was

19:07

mixed by Luce Fleming. If

19:09

you want to learn more, be sure

19:11

to visit atlasobscura.com. There's a link in

19:14

our episode description. And our

19:16

theme in end credit music is by Sam Sindel.

19:18

I'm Dylan Thurris. Wishing you all the

19:21

wonder in the world. I will see

19:23

you next time. The

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