Sumo Citrus

Agricultural Exchange

https://sumocitrus.com/about/

We have enjoyed the season of fresh citrus fruits. Our local stores have been selling “sumo citrus.’ I had not had this “hybrid mandarin” until this year. I wanted to learn more about it. I found out from the Sumo Citrus website that it came from Japan in 1972 where a “gutsy farmer from Kumamoto Prefecture” took a branch from a government testing facility and grew it on his own.¹ It became a huge hit in Japan with its easy to peel rind, delicious flavor, and seedless flesh. The name Dekopon derived from the Japanese word for bump and ponkan, another mandarin orange type. I hope you can try some. In the United States, the California growers market the delicious fruit as “sumo citrus.” They first distributed it through Whole Foods in 2011. I have purchased it at Safeway, CostCo and Foodland.

Food history makes me happy. It is always relevant and full of lessons about sharing, hard work and significant change. I often reference the Columbian Exchange in my history classes, where so much from Europe, Asia and Africa crossed the oceans changing the Americas and Oceania. The Americas and Oceania worlds did the same, transforming diets and lives globally. The example of dekopon (sumo citrus) reminded me of the many millennia of exchange.

Cover illustration, Sureshkumar Muthukumaran, The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023; Fruiting lemon tree, Casa del Frutteto (House of the Orchard), Pompeii, early first century CE. By permission of the Ministry of Culture – Archaeological Park of Pompeii.

This old, old story (told in a new way) lets me recommend a prize-wining book by Sureshkumar Muthukumaran. He is a historian at the National University of Singapore. His 2023 The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean book tells the millennia long story of products within tropical and semi-tropical Asia/Africa/Europe that people adapted to their agricultural production and diets. Chapter 4 “Persian ‘Apples’: Citruses” connects the relatively new sumo citrus to a five-thousand-year history. The citron and lemon entered into the Mediterranean in the first millennium B.C. Leviticus 23:40 has a reference to the goodly, heavenly tree which was most likely a citron. Lemon seeds have been found in Cyprus from the tenth century BC. The citron doesn't have edible fruit but the rind was used for incense and perfumes in the Indus River Valley, five millennia ago. When citron and lemons from south China were bred together, the earliest varieties of other citrus fruits began.

The fruiting lemon tree is on the left side of the wall in room number 12 of the House of the Orchard – see https://madainproject.com/house_of_the_orchard#decorations-and-paintings.

Excavations in Pompeii, the Roman town destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 C.E., show fresco paintings of a lemon tree. As I enjoy a fresh orange or squeeze lime juice into a fresh salsa, I’ll think of the many innovating farmers who over the generations made possible all citrus.

Bon Appetit (French) Aproveche (Spanish) صحتين (Arabic) स्वादिष्ट भोजन करें (Hindi) 吃好喝好 (Chinese) 召し上がれ (Japanese)

1. Dekopon, The Japan Times, 22 January 2009; https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2009/01/22/reference/dekopon/#.WwWvOnibGf0