Citric Development

1 January 2006 - As the new year dawned I found myself at one of the many fruit shops along Commercial Drive. I found myself confronted with a very large selection of citrus fruits and I purchased a selection that included a blood orange (because i've seen them often and once read about them in a 'Tell Me Why' book but have yet to try one), a couple of limes (for cocktails), some ordinary mandarins (because they're quite delicious) and some miniature Chinese mandarins that i've never seen before (they're about the size of a lychee but taste like a very sweet mandarin - to be honest though, the main reason why I chose them was the same reason why I always like to eat miniature things - because I can pretend that i'm a giant eating the offerings of the Liliputians whom i've enslaved). I also got a couple of mangos because they were on sale. The variety of the different orange based citrus fruits that I collected reminded me of a great idea I had several years back. Why aren't there any sweet limes or lemons on the market? The only reason we have sweet oranges today is because of years of selective breeding to boost the sweetness of them. And I have to presume that the easily peeled skins of mandarins are also the result of the Chinese having too much time on their hands and constantly breeding oranges that had the loosest skins. Why didn't the citrus farmers of the world create breed sweet lemons, limes and grapefruits? If a real effort was to be made today to create a sweet lemon or lime it would probably be done using genetic engineering and would involve splicing in fish or cowe genes into the bitter fruit but i'm sure it would only take a couple of generations to make a lime that was at least edible. I think when I get back to sydney that will have to be something I need to work on. For the moment it's going to go on the backburner with my other idea to cross-breed marijuana and tobacco plants to make a leaf that for more easily rolled spliffs. The only problem with that one is that by the time they legalise the first plant the other one will be made illegal. I think that it's an idea whose time has come (well, maybe it's an idea whose time came 5 years ago but I still think it's a good one).