The Orange Coloured Delight

Orange is the fruit of the citrus species Citrus aurantium, belonging to the family Rutaceae.

- Jhuma Biswas

It is also known as sweet orange, which helps it to demarcate from the related bitter orange. Sweet oranges generally taste sweet with an undercurrent of sourness.

The orange tree is an evergreen, flowering tree. Its average height generally ranges between 9 to 10 m although some very old specimens of orange tree can scale up to 15 m. When the fruit is unripe the rind of the orange fruit is usually green, and when ripe it usually assumes orange or yellowish orange colour, but it may have green patches. Sometimes in warm climates, the rind of a ripe orange can also be entirely green. Inside, the edible fruit is of orange colour.

Orange tree is one of the most cultivated fruit trees in the world. Like apple, banana and mango, orange is being cultivated across the world. They are abundantly grown in tropical and subtropical climates. The orange can be commonly explained as a delicious and healthy fruit, but scientifically it can also be explained as a hybrid between pomelo and mandarin.

Spread of Tangy Sweetness

Besides orange, lemon, lime, grapefruit and pomelo are some of the other citrus fruits. Bulk of the citrus fruit production in the world is accounted by orange. From Wikipedia we can know that as of 2012, sweet oranges comprised approximately 70percent of citrus production.

Brazil is the top producer of orange in the world. According to FAO, during 2014, 70.9 million tonnes of oranges were grown worldwide, with Brazil producing 24 percent of the world’s total production of oranges, followed by China and India. United States and Mexico are among other important producer of oranges. According to FAOSTAT data, Brazil was the largest producer of oranges in 2016, followed by China and India respectively.