WHAT’S BETTER
THAN A HIGH FIBER
BREAKFAST?A TASTY, HIGH FIBER
BREAKFAST
WITH RAISINS.variety. Love to squeeze lemon on
your fish dinner? It is actually a cit-
ron crossed with a bitter orange. Like
a blast of lime in your guac? Nothing
more than a lemon bred with a key
lime, itself a papeda-citron hybrid.
And that grapefruit-begetting sweet
orange? It’s merely a combo of man-
darin and pomelo.
Truth be told, we simply can’t help
ourselves, folks. We cross-pollinate all
too easily. Grapefruit pollen can fertil-
ize the flowers of an orange tree; lemon
pollen can mingle with clementine
blossoms. One of our favorite pranks is
when an unsuspecting human plants
a lemon seed only to get a different
kind of citrus tree altogether. Or one
adorned with thorns and no fruit at
all! We are remarkably unpredictable,
in part because our pollen contributes
different genes to every seed (similar to
how two human parents can create an
infinitely varied set of children). Forget
pulling a rabbit out of a hat—with me,
you have no idea what the hat holds!
You clever humans haven’t been
completely fooled. To bypass the un-
predictability, you learned to graft
branches—say, of that desired lemon
tree—onto rootstock to breed the ex-
act varieties of us you wanted. Nifty!
You also decoded the mystery of
our juice. Our fresh-squeezed nectar
actually becomes undrinkably bitter
in less than a day’s time. This was a
persistent problem until World War
II. Then some smarty-pants Army
scientists, keen to protect troops from
Reader’s Digest