Grapefruit was an eighteenth-century accident on Barbados, once called 'forbidden fruit'
The grapefruit did not come from ancient Asia. It arose in Barbados in the 1700s as a chance cross between a sweet orange and a pomelo, both newly brought from Asia. Its scientific name means 'of paradise', and its true hybrid origin was only confirmed in the 1940s.
Citrus x paradisi is an evergreen subtropical tree, usually 4.5 to 6 metres tall, bearing large, sour to semi-sweet, faintly bitter fruit with flesh from pale yellow to deep red. Genetic analysis shows the pomelo was the mother and the sweet orange, itself an ancient hybrid, the father. Both were in the West Indies by 1692. The Welsh clergyman Griffith Hughes described a 'forbidden fruit' in his 1750 natural history of Barbados, though it may have been a close relative rather than true grapefruit.
The name 'grapefruit' first appeared in print in 1814, when John Lunan used it for a Jamaican citrus; he said it tasted like grapes, though the fruit's grape-like clusters on the tree may be the real reason. In 1830 James Macfadyen gave it the botanical name paradisi. A French businessman, Count Odet Philippe, brought it to Florida in 1823. Kimball Atwood's grove later became the world's largest, producing 80,000 boxes a year, and pink grapefruit was found there in 1906.
Colour drove much of its commercial history. A red fruit discovered growing on a pink tree led to the 1929 Ruby Red patent, and Texas made that variety its official state fruit in 1993. Because red tones tended to fade to pink, breeders turned to radiation: the Rio Red, registered in 1984, came from bud sticks treated with thermal neutrons. The Star Ruby, from an irradiated Hudson grapefruit, is the darkest red of all but harder to grow. Grapefruit juice carries about half the citric acid of lemon juice and roughly 50 percent more than orange juice.
The fruit is famous for interfering with medicines. Compounds called furanocoumarins block the CYP3A4 enzyme, part of a family that breaks down about 90 percent of drugs, so some medicines build up in the blood while others fail to activate. A single grapefruit or 200 millilitres of juice can be enough. In 2023, world production with pomelos reached 9.93 million tonnes, 52 percent of it in China.
Source: Grapefruit
