r/todayilearned • u/Geek_Nan • 2d ago
TIL: Lemons are not a naturally occurring fruit. They were created in SE Asia by crossing a citron with a bitter orange around 4000 years ago. They were spread around the world after found to prevent scurvy. Life didn’t give us lemons.. We made them ourselves.
https://www.trueorbetter.com/2018/05/how-lemon-was-invented.html?m=1[removed] — view removed post
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u/Supersnazz 1d ago edited 1d ago
There's probably not a commonly consumed fruit or vegetable anywhere in the world that occurred naturally.
Humans are farmers. We modify all our plants and animals to eat them
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u/BaltimoreAlchemist 1d ago
Yup! The one at the top is the wild parent/cousin of corn, from which it was domesticated millennia ago. The middle is a hybrid between the two.
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u/ColoradoScoop 1d ago
Holy crap. I knew it was very heavily domesticated, just didn’t realize it was that domesticated.
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u/Seanxietehroxxor 1d ago
In the 1930s US corn yields were around 2 tons per hectare. Now they are around 11. About 50%-60% of that increase comes from improved genetics via breeding.
Source: Essentials of Plant Breeding by Dr. Rex Bernardo.
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u/Kitselena 1d ago
Have you ever seen a natural watermelon? almost every plant we eat is wildly different than how they naturally occur
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u/dgjapc 1d ago
Bananas before domestication https://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/banana.png
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u/dabberoo_2 1d ago
This thread led me down a little rabbit hole and I found this easy-to-understand comparison of several crops we grow and eat today. Practically all of them are unrecognizable from what they originated as
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u/MiklaneTrane 1d ago
I'm surprised that article didn't mention the dozen different vegetables that were all domesticated from the same plant.
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u/GuitarCFD 1d ago
That could also be a different species of banana altogether. There was a completely different species that was popular before WWI (could be wrong about the time frame), that has now completely (or almost completely) gone due to disease.
Source: Gros Michel Bananas and i was off on the time frame...they became commercially inviable in the 1960s due to Panama Disease.
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u/Drtyboi611 1d ago
Our current banana species is getting the same disease now and scientists are quickly trying to make a replacement banana.
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u/Boathead96 1d ago
trying to make a replacement banana.
We're gonna need more than one I think, I eat two a day sometimes so it wouldn't last very long
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u/facw00 1d ago
Our current Cavendish bananas are all clones exclusively propagated by cuttings (which makes them potentially extremely vulnerable to disease). Any replacement would likely be similar (people don't like seeds in their bananas), so they do in fact really only need one (plant). Bananas are weird...
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u/insane_contin 1d ago
They're all the same species, just different cultivars.
A great dane and a yorkie are both the same species. Lots of fruits and vegetables are like that.
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u/HawkeyGawds 1d ago
Ironic that the cheapest fruit at the grocery store right now could soon be wiped out, or at least made rare and therefore expensive
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u/DeusFerreus 1d ago
Note that's not really natural either, it's just at an earlier stage of selective breeding process.
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u/Trentskiroonie 1d ago
That picture is just an unripe watermelon, not a non-domesticated one
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u/MarlinMr 1d ago
Actually no. It's not a "non-domesticated" one, as those are pea size and have to be opened with a hammer. But it's also not just an unripe one of todays variants.
We still have that there variant today, and can grow them if we feel like it, but why would we do that?
Look at the seeds in the painting. They are black. Meaning it's ripe. The one in the image has white unripe seeds.
It's worth noting that they had other redder variants back then too, but this guy chose to paint a less red variant. Watermelons were not just used for eating, but for storing water. Doesn't really matter how it tastes at that point.
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u/frezik 1d ago
What's even crazier is that the really big step from the natural plant (teosinte) to maize was done by Native Americans a long time ago, and it's not clear how they did it. Just like modern corn, maize can't propagate on its own, so its definitely not a natural verity. How you make the genetic leap from the teosinte to maize is an unsolved mystery.
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u/AllRadioisDead 1d ago
wow that's some weak ass corn, we buffed the shit out of corn
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u/h3lblad3 1d ago
Funny enough, “corn” is just the word for whatever the most common grain crop in an area is. That’s why we call it that. The actual grain is called maize.
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u/BenevolentCheese 1d ago edited 1d ago
Asparagus is close to its wild form. Most of the things we call "berries," including blueberries and raspberries and mulberries, as well. And mushrooms are virtually untouched, although they are not plants, of course.
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u/CardOfTheRings 1d ago
I’ve found wild raspberries before and they are very similar to the cultivated thing.
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u/01029838291 1d ago
I work around a lot of wild blackberry pretty often. They're identical to what you'd buy in the store and delicious. It almost makes up for having to hike through the ankle-grabbing, thorny vines they come on.
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u/CardOfTheRings 1d ago
Where my grandparents lived blackberry bushes were full of venomous snakes. Rodents love the berries and the snakes came for the rodents.
Between the vines and the snakes blackberry picking was perilous. Snakes are usually pretty docile but copperheads have great camouflage and if you accidentally step on one or too near one repeatedly it will bite. Be careful.
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u/RedstoneRelic 1d ago
We used to get wild strawberries In my yard. Tiny little things.
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u/truethatson 1d ago
The history of cultivation is fascinating, and it isn’t just orange pumpkins and green apples. For instance, kale, brussels sprouts, cauliflower and cabbage, all come from the same plant.
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u/nobodyisonething 2d ago
When life gives you lemons IT WAS SOMEBODY'S FAULT. THIS DID NOT HAPPEN NATURALLY.
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u/southernmost 1d ago
DEMAND TO SPEAK TO LIFE'S MANAGER! OH THERE'S NOTHING THAT CAN BE DONE?!? WELL I'M GOING TO HAVE MY ENGINEERS DESIGN EXPLODING LEMONS AND BURN LIFE'S HOUSE DOWN!!!
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u/grendel_x86 1d ago
When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down! - Cave Johnson
(Since the partial quote doesn't really give the amazingness of portal2)
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u/DrMobius0 1d ago
If you want to hear the actual rant in all its ridiculous glory
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u/Whooshless 1d ago
Even the full quote… even the audio file used in that video… still doesn’t capture that moment in the game, with his voice echoing through the halls while potato-GladOS gets pumped up and intersperses “Yeah!”s and other commentary.
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u/xanthraxoid 2d ago edited 1d ago
Do you ever wonder why Brits are sometimes called Limeys? Everyone knows it's because our sailors ate limes to avoid getting scurvy.
What most people don't know is why they didn't eat lemons.
The reason is that the British Empire had managed to alienate (EDIT: nearly) every lemon producing country on the planet *sigh*
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u/DanYHKim 1d ago
How Scurvy Was Cured, then the Cure Was Lost
This article uses the following link as it's source -- https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
The story of scurvy and lemons is convoluted and has unexpected twists. Lemons were used to prevent scurvy, but they were sourced from Sicily.
In that year, naval authorities switched procurement from Mediterranean lemons to West Indian limes. The motives for this were mainly colonial - it was better to buy from British plantations than to continue importing lemons from Europe. Confusion in naming didn't help matters. Both "lemon" and "lime" were in use as a collective term for citrus, and though European lemons and sour limes are quite different fruits, their Latin names (citrus medica, var. limonica and citrus medica, var. acida) suggested that they were as closely related as green and red apples. Moreover, as there was a widespread belief that the antiscorbutic properties of lemons were due to their acidity, it made sense that the more acidic Caribbean limes would be even better at fighting the disease.
All good, right?
In this, the Navy was deceived. Tests on animals would later show that fresh lime juice has a quarter of the scurvy-fighting power of fresh lemon juice. And the lime juice being served to sailors was not fresh, but had spent long periods of time in settling tanks open to the air, and had been pumped through copper tubing. A 1918 animal experiment using representative samples of lime juice from the navy and merchant marine showed that the 'preventative' often lacked any antiscorbutic power at all.
Copper renders ascorbic acid totally ineffective. However . . .
By the middle of the 19th century, however, advances in technology were reducing the need for any kind of scurvy preventative. Steam power had shortened travel times considerably from the age of sail, so that it was rare for sailors other than whalers to be months at sea without fresh food. Citrus juice was a legal requirement on all British vessels by 1867, but in practical terms it was becoming superfluous.
So the lack of protection by reduced lime juice was not really noticed.
Several events demonstrated the problem, discrediting the citrus juice theory of scurvy prevention, and an alternative theory of scurvy protection gained support!
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u/OneTime_AtBandCamp 1d ago
This article uses the following link as it's source -- https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
Just FYI, this site is basically someone's (admittedly pretty good) creative writing exercise. Example.
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u/anothergaijin 1d ago
You might enjoy the other Naval food disease story - or why Japanese naval vessels serve curry on Fridays: https://warriormaven.com/history/eating-too-much-rice-almost-sank-the-japanese-navy
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u/nicolasknight 1d ago
Did they have a flag?
NO!
No flag no country!
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u/pedanticPandaPoo 1d ago
You can't claim us! We live here!
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u/icepikk 1d ago
Do you have a flag?
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u/MendraMarie 1d ago
That's according to the rules that.... I've just made up!
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u/Greymore 1d ago
And I'm backing it up with this gun.
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u/dyperbole 1d ago
What is it Lieutenant Sebastian?
It's just the Rebels, sir... they're here.
My God, man! Do they want tea?
No, I think they're after something a bit more than that, sir. They've brought a flag.
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u/NorwaySpruce 2d ago
They had lemons too but limes were easier to get. They were also basically useless because they had less Vitamin C than lemons
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u/kurburux 1d ago
It also depended on the way they were stored.
If that lime juice was stored in a barrel or came into contact with copper or cooked to reduce it [...], the Vitamin C would degrade even further, becoming nearly useless against scurvy.
People also still didn't really know what exactly prevented scurvy.
Sailors often associated scurvy cures with acidity, which makes good sense and is not far from the truth. Other cures brought aboard ships included acidic food and beverages including vinegar and sauerkraut. It wasn't until 1918 that it was proven that citric acid itself is useless against scurvy (and I assume vinegar's acetic acid too), and shortly thereafter that the newly-identified Vitamin C was the anti-scorubic needed.
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u/whiskytamponflamenco 1d ago
Saurkraut would work against scurvy. Per 100g, saurkrait has 20mg of Vit C, compared to lemon juice that has 40-50mg. It's less but it stores better.
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u/OpeningTechnical5884 1d ago
If they still prevented scurvy then they were hardly useless.
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u/myempireofdust 1d ago
They didn't, that's the interesting thing. But the switch from lemons to lime coincided with the rise of steam boats which led to shorter voyages.
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u/gorbachev 1d ago
Listened to a fun podcast about this by Tim Harford. Apparently, the limes actually didn't prevent scurvy at all, but by the time the royal navy switched over to limes, scurvy had stopped being an issue for them anyway as their sailors had improved access to fresh food (i.e., improvements in their logistics networks, greater numbers of British friendly/controlled ports in the world, improvements in ship speed / navigation = less time spent without scurvy preventing vegetables). The Scott polar expedition, however, ended up having issues with scurvy because of this.
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u/invol713 2d ago
How does one cross the two? Pollinate one type of tree with the other, or are there other ways?
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u/xanthraxoid 2d ago
Pollinate one type of tree with the other
Yes
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u/A_Sad_Goblin 1d ago
Why couldn't this have happened naturally? They wouldn't grow near each other?
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u/BigBootyRiver 1d ago
It could happen naturally if they were grown near each other, but you’d have to plant every seed from every fruit and wait years for them to fruit to even know. Doing it by hand gives you an idea at least.
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u/MarlinMr 1d ago
While it might happen naturally, that doesn't mean the plants will survive.
A lot of the hybrids we make are shit plants for living in the wild. They only survive because we keep them alive.
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u/BenevolentCheese 1d ago
It can and does happen naturally in the plant world all the time. Wild hybrids abound in botany. But it's not happening with any purpose or reliability. A perfect modern grapefruit required more than a single cross between a pomelo and a Mandarin orange, it required hundreds if not thousands of crosses and selections to get it where we want. A wild hybrid will just result in whatever, and if it survives into maturity, will end up back-crossing with its lineage and likely won't proliferate in its base form.
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u/SomeCountryFriedBS 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sometimes the parts don't match, as it were. You gotta swab the plant cum and smoosh it right into the other plant's ovaries.
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u/PM_Kittens 1d ago
I'm not sure about citrus fruits, but some pollinators only visit a single plant species (orchids are a good example of this), so manual pollination may be the only way to cross pollinate certain species.
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u/skwolf522 2d ago
You put them together, play some barry white music.
Them say the magic words. "Now kith"
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u/Avoiding101519 2d ago
Kale, broccoli, cauliflower, collard greens were all originally mustard. I'm not sure how they do it, selective breeding or such, but old humans were very good at turning one plant into a variety of others.
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u/gymnerd_03 2d ago
That's a completely different thing tho. Mating two trees and simply planting the tree with the bigger leaf repeatedly are pretty different things.
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u/hoffmanmclaunsky 1d ago
Yeah but on top of different selection for different "breeds" of that same plant, those foods are different parts of the plant as well. Broccoli and cauliflower are the flowers of the plant, Brussels sprouts are the buds, kale and collard greens are the leaves.
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u/pete1901 2d ago
If you can get Chihuahuas and Great Danes from a common ancestor then anything is possible!
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u/RiddlingVenus0 1d ago
You can also breed chihuahuas and great danes together and get chidanedanes.
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u/lifeofideas 1d ago
Even now, the people of Mexico remember the famous words of the man who bred the world’s first chihuahua:
“I have made a terrible mistake.”
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u/Thedrunner2 2d ago
Sounds like someone from Shelbyville wrote this
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u/ArbainHestia 1d ago
And with that, a mighty cheer went up from the heroes of Shelbyville. They had banished the awful lemon tree forever... because it was haunted. Now, let's all celebrate... with a cool glass of turnip juice.
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u/Aonswitch 1d ago edited 1d ago
What fruits that are sold regularly and en made don’t have this exact same property? Idk humans breeding plants isn’t wild to me, exact opposite actually lol
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u/Porcupineemu 1d ago
Fruits, vegetables, animals. Practically nothing we eat looks like it did before people.
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u/DigitalTomFoolery 1d ago
Pics of old time watermelons look weird, they were mostly rind and seeds.
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u/mojitz 1d ago
Yeah, like, isn't this kind of the basis of all civilization — the fact that we figured out how to breed tastier, more calorie-dense plants and animals from wild species? I guess there are certain cultivars of berries and nuts we eat that are fairly close to their wild varieties, but other than that there isn't a hell of a lot we haven't pretty radically reshaped.
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u/pfc9769 1d ago
OP only focused on lemons, but all modern citrus originate from 3-4 wild varieties that were cross breed. They are the pomelo, mandarin, citron, and a fourth one I forget to make limes. Bitter orange is a cross of mandarin and pomelo. Cross the result with citron to get lemons.
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u/MaxTHC 1d ago
Confusingly the same names for the wild varieties crop up in other languages as names for the cross-bred varieties. Off the top of my head you have citron meaning "lemon" in French and pomelo meaning "grapefruit" in Spanish.
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u/marvelous_much 2d ago
When life gives you scurvy…
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u/mightypint 2d ago
Invent lemons?
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u/someawe45 1d ago
make lemonadeMake life take the lemons back→ More replies32
u/GiraffeWithATophat 1d ago
Get mad!
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u/IC2Flier 1d ago
I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons!
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u/Screamline 1d ago
I. LOVE that speech and that game. I want portal 3 but idk how they can top it. P2 is a masterpiece imo
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u/BenevolentCheese 1d ago
Very few of the foods we eat are naturally occurring for both vegetables and animals. Chickens, cows, sheep and pigs have all been bred to be quite different than their wild versions. Vegetables have gone even farther: broccoli, cabbage, kale, and many others all come from the same wild plant! Vegetables, fruit, roots and fruit have all been cultivated and hybridized and bred into things nature was never close to producing.
There are some notable exceptions. The big one are mushrooms: some are cultivated, but mushroom hybridization is all but non-existent. The mushrooms we eat are very close to their wild forms. Asparagus is a vegetable that hasn't been messed with much, and the fish we eat are natural, too.
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u/fucknozzle 1d ago
Corn is the same. It's not a natural product, it's selectively bred grass.
It has no way to self propagate either. If someone doesn't take the seeds off the cob and replant them, it would disappear altogether.
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u/Set_the_Mighty 1d ago
"When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
- Cave Johnson
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u/Ejaculpiss 2d ago
Welp this is confusing since Lemon == Citron in french
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u/ep3ep3 1d ago edited 1d ago
In Mexican Spanish, limón means both lemon and lime. In my experience, asking for limón will almost always get you a lime, unless you specify the yellow (limón amarillo) one.
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u/inkyblinkypinkysue 1d ago
Aren't most modern fruits the results of people mucking about?
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u/Lone-flamingo 2d ago
As someone whose first language calls lemons citroner I am suddenly very confused by the difference between a citron and a lemon.