MARKETPLACE - American Public Media's Marketplace, broadcast on National Public Radio affiliates around the U.S., features Givaudan Citrus Variety Collection curator Tracy Kahn in a segment about tangerines, also know as mandarins or clementines.
Marketplace listener Rick Peters is 73, retired, and lives in Frederick, Maryland. He shared this memory: “When I was growing up, it was always a treat around the holiday season to get these small oranges, kind-of nicely packaged, nested in the box, and fairly pricey.”
“There’s the genus Citrus, subfamily Aurantioideae, in the plant family called Rutaceae,” said UC-Riverside botanist Tracy Kahn. She directs the university’s world-renowned Citrus Variety Collection with more than 1,000 living specimens.
“Citrus originated in Southeast Asia — the Yunnan province of China is thought to be the seat of domestication,” she said. That was sometime in the Paleolithic era. Sometime in the mid-1800s, a small seeded orange variety grown in Morocco was imported into the U.S., Kahn said. “’Tangerine’ is a term that was coined from brightly-colored sweet mandarins that shipped from the Port of Tangiers to Florida,” she explained.