I was just reading a little factoid article titled “Eating in the Fifties”. Most of the items on the list seemed pretty reasonable.
But one item was “Bananas and oranges only appeared at Christmas time’”. Is that accurate?
I know there was a time when these fruits were considered exotic and rare. But I thought that by the nineteen-fifties they were ordinary food in the United States; something that Beaver Cleaver or Bud Anderson would have found in their lunchbox.
I grew up in the sixties and bananas and oranges were certainly not considered rare then.
I don’t think so. In 1961 I lived in the Congo where we bought bananas and pineapple from the Banana Madame who came to our house, and I don’t remember them being considered exotic. We definitely ate oranges also. I lived in New York, not Florida.
Maybe they didn’t get to the middle of Montana or something.
Oranges were Christmas stocking stuffers during the 1930’s. My mom has mentioned getting fruit at Christmas.
Bing Crosby helped make Minute Maid a national brand. The development of frozen orange juice concentrate occurred just after WWII.
The push to get orange juice into consumers homes began in the late1940’s. I would speculate that fresh oranges became easily available a few years later.
I suppose it was just nostalgia because we’d put the stocking oranges right back in the bowl with all the other ones, but I got oranges in my stocking (a few walnuts, too) throughout my childhood (born in 1964).
My mom mentioned it was an old fashioned thing and I always sort of imagined Pa Ingalls trading some labor or whatever for these rare delicacies to treat his kids.
I guess that the answer to the OP’s question depends on where you were in the world.
In England, fruit and vegetables were never rationed like dairy and meat products, but since all oranges and bananas had to be imported and it took some time before “luxury” items were given room on the remains of the merchant fleet, many children born during the war would have started school before seeing such exotic fruit.
By the 50s they were not uncommon, although they would have been expensive and out of reach for the poorer families.
My dad grew up in rural Saskatchewan in the 40s and 50s and oranges were considered a Christmas (or special occasion) item for him. I don’t know if he ever ate bananas as a kid.
This continued in some places at least as late as the 50s. That’s when my mother was growing up in Newfoundland, and they had the same tradition. In fact, an orange in our stockings is still a family tradition, because as far as my mother was concerned, that’s what you do at Christmas.
But when she was growing up, it was definitely a rare Christmas treat, and not just a quirky holdover.
So, yeah, in poorer places with less access to international shipping, this was probably still common in the 50s.
I’m guessing it’s not so much that they were uncommon as they were seasonal. I’ve been in the produce business my entire life and every year things have a longer and longer season. It wasn’t that long ago that, for example, it was unheard of to find a pomegranate in a store in the midwest (USA) in July or a clementine in February. Now no one thinks anything of it.
Here’s a picture of two of my family members with, what I suppose is, the first iteration of our current business. Oranges, 15¢/dz, but I have no idea what season the picture was taken during.
(For anyone familiar with the Milwaukee area, this would have been on Ogden Ave. IIRC from the last time I worked it out, it would have been in the building that’s currently a Chipotle.)
During the 1950s a disease outbreak nearly wiped out the Gros Michel banana, at that time the world’s most popular variety. It took a few years for the industry to commercialize the Cavendish, the variety we eat today. I don’t distinctly remember a banana shortage, but we rarely had them in the house - apples were what we grew up on.
As for oranges (and grapefruit), I think Joey_P is right that it was a seasonal thing. There were a lot of fresh produce products that were in scarce supply at various times of the year. Citrus fruits happened to be in season during the winter, corn and blueberries (among others) were only available during the summer.
I was born in the 1980s and my sister and I were raised in Indiana, and we were always very happy to get our yearly box of oranges and grapefruits at Christmastime from Nee-Nee and Pop-Pop.
By then, oranges and grapefruits weren’t particularly exotic, but there was at least one company that provided a subscription service where you could send oranges and grapefruits to family members for the holidays.
I don’t want it to seem like our relationship with Nee-Nee and Pop-Pop was purely transactional; it certainly wasn’t; we loved them dearly. They were two of the most loving people I’ve ever met. But when the oranges and grapefruits stopped coming, the year after they died, that was one of the signs of, “Wow… they’re really gone.”
Out of season, they were uncommon enough outside CA and FL that there was a company called Mission Pack "Say the magic word, say Mission Pack…" that would send a crate of oranges to your relatives in the colder states for Christmas, and it was a welcome gift. The Jingle is memorable and a earworm.
Last night, my wife and I were watching an episode of “A Chef’s Life,” a PBS cooking/documentary series about Vivian Howard, a chef from a small town in eastern North Carolina. They were showing a repeat of a Christmas-themed episode, from 2015; in it, Vivian was talking about how the kids at the local high school still sold boxes of Christmas oranges to everyone in the community at Christmastime, as a fund-raiser.
Even though oranges are generally now available year-round in the U.S., it seems like the tradition still holds, at least in some areas.
My mom also grew up in rural Saskatchewan in the 40s and 50s and mentioned not seeing a banana until she was a teenager (mid- to late 50s). Some of this was undoubtedly also poverty; there may have been bananas in stores in Prince Albert or Saskatoon, but not in the shops where she was, and not something Grandma would have been able to buy if there were.
Oh, yes, I bought fundraiser boxes of citrus from a coworker to benefit her child’s FFA club not too long ago. For several years. The tangelos were excellent.
I’m upset that I can no longer eat grapefruit, because I’m on a certain type of antipsychotic medication. Eating grapefruit would cause a reaction that would increase the level of that medication to an obscenely dangerous level.
I didn’t eat a whole lot of grapefruit, anyway, but Ruby Red grapefruit juice from Ocean Spray was my jam in college.
