If I were a more suspicious person, I would swear that the marketers of the world are attempting to destroy one of my Christmas traditions, the tangerine. Of course, if you were the mandarin marketing board, you would want us all to be eating their fruit every month of the year. With all of the new varieties being bred, it is now nearly possible.

I have read one marketing report that seriously discusses the possibility of specifically targeting children. They actually think that they can promote the mandarin as a child-friendly snack. I can see my boys now, standing in front of the counter mulling over their decision: a) should I chose the chocolate bar which is full of calories, sugar, fats and everything bad for me or b) take the attractive and healthy mandarin which is easy to eat and even comes in a biodegradable wrapper.  I just don't think that this marketing scheme is going to work.

The Mandarin orange is considered a native of south-eastern Asia and the Philippines, but over the past few centuries, it has traveled around the globe and is now grown in the Mediterranean, Italy, the southern United States, Mexico and California. Mandarin is the name of a species of orange, Citrus reticulata, that is made up of three classes all having one trait in common: their skins all come off in an easy, zipper-like manner. Most of the oranges that we see today are cultivars, a term for plants which have been produced by cross-breeding. The names Mandarin and Tangerine are often treated as interchangeable, but of the three classes, only one is truly called a Tangerine. Class I is the Mandarin , and it is the least familiar fruit. Most of these exotically named fruit such as Changsa and Le-dar, are either ornamental or just not available commercially. Class II, the Tangerine class, contains the Dancy, which was the tangerines we knew when we were children as the Christmas orange, the Robinson and Sunburst. These fruit differ from each other in numbers of seeds, colour, sweetness and harvesting date. They all contain seeds and are the most common mandarin grown in the United states. The tangelo is a cross between a tangerine and a grapefruit. The final class of mandarin is the Satsuma orange. The Satsuma orange is grown largely in Japan, and it is this class that is giving the American grown tangerines a run for their money.  It is virtually seedless and is marketed as seedless.  It also has an earlier harvest than the tangerine, and can be in the markets before the end of September. Because of its characteristic seedlessness, it has become the favoured mandarin in our society of seed-loathers. There are several varieties of the Satsuma which have different harvest times, therefore making them available over a longer period of the year.  It is the Satsuma orange that is used almost exclusively for tinned oranges because of its seedlessness.