Oranges, and derivative products such as juice, are so ubiquitous in the modern supermarket, most consumers take the fruit for granted. Yet, it wasn’t so long ago that citrus was a rare luxury cherished as a gift and reserved for the upper classes. Amazingly, the fruits we eat today are mainly cultivated hybrids grown from cloned trees and shipped all around the globe far from their place of origin.
In Foreign Fruit, Irish Chinese Malaysian author Katie Goh intertwines the history of the citrus fruit into a narrative focused on the examination of her own identity. Goh traces her heritage, and the heritage of the orange, from Asia, along the Silk Road, to Europe, to California, and eventually back to China. The narrative weaves together past and present, tying together a global food pathway with Goh’s personal exploration. Her journey evolves through the book, moving away from simply exploring her heritage, into a pursuit of citrus through time and space, visiting 19th century orangeries in Europe and modern orange groves in America and Malay. Citrus begins to preoccupy her while writing the book.
Goh grew up in Northern Ireland, a place marked by imperial conquest and divided by religion. She describes seeing “how bodies that could not assimilate into the majority white, patriarchal, Protestant social order were deemed to be a threat. People who were non-white, queer, Catholic, immigrants were openly demonised as foreign invaders.” Ireland, like Malaysia, where her grandparents immigrated to from China, was also Colonized by the British. These parallels draw Goh to the fruit, the object of empire at the center of the imperial trade.
The intention here is to create a sense of returning over the route citrus took on its way to Europe. That journey took centuries, with layovers in the Middle East and north Africa, though for Goh, she can fly the route in a day.
One of the challenges facing the dissemination of citrus is the seeds will germinate different fruits than the one producing the seed. The seed of a sweet orange might produce a bitter one. Only grafting a branch to roots will yield the same fruit varietal with the same characteristics, and the process of grafting and transplanting was far more complicated than simply transporting seeds. Fruit groves are built from grafting buds to ensure the same fruits. Nevertheless, seeds too were distributed around the world by navies looking to keep scurvy at bay or travelers hoping for the best, with new hybrids formed by these haphazard plantings.
The beauty of this narrative is Goh’s ability to pull together disparate snippets of personal and global history into a coherent and entertaining story. Like the branch of an orange tree, she has grafted her journey onto the story of the fruit, and like history, her story is not necessarily a straight line.
Goh is waylaid in 2020 by the pandemic when she is trapped at her parents’ home during the lockdown. It’s in these moments she is most relatable, frustrated at paying rent on a flat she’s not living in, or experimenting with painting as she had as a child. This time provides her the space to contemplate the book, and the issues citrus raises.
She effortlessly slips between the present and the past to make these links, to tie together her commentary on the modern state of things to the history of citrus. The book is a critique of our present through the lens of citrus history. She examines capitalism when discussing the Dutch colonial era trade and modern production techniques, and examines communism under China’s Great Leap Forward. During those years, citrus crops were plowed under for grain, the crops failed, and people starved. She notes that had her grandmother not fled, she likely would have succumbed as millions of others had. Though she is writing a history, the citrus serves merely as the doorway to enter into these political and cultural critiques. There’s less a conclusion that capitalism or communism is worse than the other, but rather both might simply be problematic in different ways.
There’s solid storytelling throughout the book following the early Citrons to the Mediterranean basin by way of the Silk Road, of how British sailors would lose their teeth from scurvy until the realization that citrus fruits kept the disease at bay, and the creation of juice concentrate. If there is one thing missing, it’s that citrus history has so many diverse origin myths. Every orange varietal we eat today was created or discovered, and some of this history is overlooked. Goh of course is not writing an encyclopedia, but rather curating the history to tell a story.
The narrative diverges into tangents at times too, like the Dutch import of porcelain. But this wandering narrative is the point, linking tidbits of history along the way and finding connections, personal for Goh, and historical for the rest of us. As the book meanders, Goh observes her own personal moments of understanding. She finds a similarity with the blended hybrids of citrus, and compares them to her own blended cultures. The question, ultimately, is one posed by many food and culture writers–the question of authenticity. What is the meaning of authenticity when all of history is the borrowing and sharing and combining of food and art and culture?
She perhaps finds an answer when she visits another empire, the United States. Florida and California are both powerhouses of citrus, ironically exporting many fruits back to China where it originated. But she observes here too the shortcomings of empire, noting that “I had come to California to find orange trees, and I had found enough for a lifetime. But in the groves, I had also discovered the intertwining histories of a citrus industry and a nation which grew from roots of supremacy, exclusion, and sorrow.”
Goh has succeeded in writing a compelling narrative about the history of citrus. There are details that might have been glossed over, but only for the sake of creating a compelling narrative. She’s braided in her own story too, with her memoir providing the roots the citrus needs to flourish. Foreign Fruit unpeels the interwoven story of the orange and empire while raising questions of authenticity, otherness, and identity.
NONFICTION
Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange
By Katie Goh
Tin House Books
Published May 6, 2025
