Foreign Fruit: A Personal History of the Orange by Katie Goh review: 'fascinating'

Weaving together social, economic and political history, this is a thoroughly enjoyable and intellectually stimulating book, writes Allan Massie

The subtitle of this book is “A Personal History of the Orange”. Fair enough. The history of the orange is interesting, as is the history of other foods, but not that interesting. Katie Goh offers a great deal more than that, however, and what this book is really about is the social, economic and political history surrounding what may be the most popular fruit today.

The first sentence of the prologue is a reminder not to look for comfort: “The morning after a white man murdered six Asian women, I ate five oranges.” She eats them savagely, then goes on to remark that in Victorian Britain for a woman to eat oranges in public was “an affront to good manners”. She quotes from Cranford, Mrs Gaskell’s 1847 bestseller.

Navel oranges are displayed for sale in the fresh produce area of a Sprouts Farmers Market grocery store in Redondo Beach, California on February 23, 2024 | AFP via Getty Images

The orange has become international. It is hard for us Scots to reflect that Robert the Bruce never ate one. The advance of the orange is the story of Empire and there is a fine examination of a still life painted in 1669 by the Dutch painter, Wilhelm Kalf. Goh admires and enjoys the work, but also points out that everything in the painting is a fruit of Empire.

Goh is half South Asian Chinese and half Northern Irish British, now based in Edinburgh. She is, like so many of her generation, a severe critic of European imperialism although she also recognises that we are all its children.

She doesn’t shirk from the horrors of the past that affected her family, her Chinese grandparents being moved from southern China to what is now Malaysia, doing so in time to escape the horrors of Chairman Mao Zedong’s lunatic economic policy, The Great Leap Forward, which resulted in a famine lasting several years. No oranges for Chinese peasants then.

Katie Goh | Alice Meikle

Considering her own background, she judges that both Malaysia and Britain make her uncomfortable because of the images that they have made for themselves. No doubt there is some reason for such discomfort, but every nation, every country, has its own myth and its own distorting mirror. This thought - and there are many such reflections - takes us a long way from the oranges, but we are always pulled back.

There are 40 pages on the history of oranges and orange growing in California, and she is alert to the ruthlessness of capitalism, although not blind to its achievements. Goh began writing this book during the Covid-19 pandemic, but not even during that time of enormous disruption were we deprived of oranges and orange juice.

This book prompted me to try to remember my own early experience of oranges. Like so many children of the wartime generation, I can recall my first banana, or, at least, I think I can, but oranges? Nothing. Perhaps the reason is familiarity. The orange and other citrus fruits have been part of our everyday lives for so many years now that it is almost impossible for us to regard them as foreign. The orange is as British, or Irish, as fish and chips.

In Foreign Fruit, Goh, has written a thoroughly enjoyable and intellectually stimulating book. Few will agree with everything she writes but everyone will learn much of interest and there is much matter for discussion. Anyone interested in history, and indeed oranges, will find it fascinating.

Foreign Fruit by Katie Goh, Canongate, £16