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Chemical Education Today
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Letters
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Choice of Citrus Fruit
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E. J. Behrman
Department of Biochemistry, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210-1292
C. F. Behrman
Department of History, Wittenberg University, Springfield, OH 45501
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February 2004
Vol. 81 No. 2
p. 196
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Sowa and Kondo have published an experiment in this Journal (1) in which students are asked to imagine that each is an 18th century sea captain about to take a long voyage. Which citrus fruit would the student take? The experiment is designed to measure the vitamin C concentrations in lemons, limes, oranges, and grapefruit. But there is another dimension to the sea captain’s problem, which suggests a very practical extension of the experiment. Which fruit keeps best over a long period? We have not done the experiment properly, but from long experience in the kitchen we can say that we have never seen a lime become moldy. Lemons on long storage are easily infected by what looks like Penicillium. Nor do oranges keep as well as limes. Grapefruit stores well, but may not have been as readily available as the others, as judged from the first use of “shaddock”, the old name for grapefruit. The Oxford English Dictionary (1st ed.) gives the earliest recorded use of each word: “orange” and “lemon” are in use around 1400; “lime” dates from 1638, and “shaddock” not until 1700. These observations are consistent with the term “lime-juicer” (1859) (now Limey) and “to lime-juice” (1892) meaning to make long voyages. In practice, however, it was more commonly the juice of lemons or limes, preserved with brandy, that was used rather than the fruits themselves so that the question is not, in most cases, which fruit the sea captain should take but which juice has the largest concentration of Vitamin C after storage under 18th century conditions (2). Literature Cited- Sowa, S.; Kondo, A. E. J. Chem. Educ. 2003, 80, 550.
- Carpenter, K. J. The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1986, pp 92-93 and 236-237.
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| More Information |
 Citation |
Behrman, E. J.; Behrman, C. F. J. Chem. Educ. 2004 81 196.
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Keywords |
Analytical Chemistry; General Chemistry; History / Philosophy; Inquiry-Based / Discovery Method; Laboratory Instruction; Problem-Based Learning; Titration / Titrimetry
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History |
Created:
Last Updated: |
January 5, 2004
February 25, 2005
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