What's My Trade? Lemonade! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Australia

The lemonade variety of lemon is a soft-skinned, sweet fruit that can be eaten like an orange. It can be used as a fresh fruit, and its juice is good to drink without extra sugar. The lemonade tree is citrus limon (lemon) crossed with citrus reticulata (mandarin orange), developed in Australia by Engall's Nursery in New South Wales in the 1980s. Under the right conditions, including full sun and good drainage, it can be grown in U.S. Department of Agriculture zones 8-10.

Other popular varieties of lemon are the Meyer, Yen Ben or Lisbon, and Eureka. Mandarin oranges include tangerines, clementines, satsumas, and tangors (also known as temple oranges); they are popular fruits for Christmas and Chinese New Year celebrations.

Answer: pomegranate

Originating in ancient Persia but long known throughout the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean regions and beyond, pomegranates are described in Exodus 28:33-35 as alternating with bells on the hem of the high priest's robes: "You shall make on its hem pomegranates of blue and purple and scarlet material, all around on its hem, and bells of gold between them all around: a golden bell and a pomegranate, all around on the hem of the robe.

It shall be on Aaron when he ministers..." (NIV). Pomegranates are eaten on the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) because their many seeds symbolize fruitfulness.

They are one of the "seven species" of foods listed in Deuteronomy 8:8 as products of the promised land, and they have appeared on ancient Jewish coins.

In the Qur'an, pomegranates symbolize blessings of Allah, and they grow in Paradise. In ancient Greece, pomegranates appear in the myth of Persephone, who was tricked by Hades into eating six pomegranate seeds and therefore had to spend half of the year in the Underworld.

The fruit also has significance in Egyptian, Persian, Hindu, Chinese, Armenian, and Azerbaijani cultures. The pomegranate's scientific name - "punica granatum" - reflects its importance to the Punic peoples, Phoenicians and Carthaginians, who spread its cultivation on their trading journeys. The image that accompanies our question illustrates the importance of the pomegranate in Christian art, where it keeps its Old Testament connotations but also symbolizes the passion and resurrection of Jesus. Pomegranates and their juice are highly valued in modern cultures for their flavor and nutritional value.

Answer: citron

The word "citrus" was originally applied to the citron, which is thought to be one of the ancient fruits from which all subsequent citrus fruits developed. Its place of origin is unclear: some sources argue for India or Southeast Asia, but seeds have been found in Mesopotamian archaeological digs that go back as far as 4,000 B.C., so its dispersal seems to go very far back in time.

Its name reflects its presence in Media, near ancient Persia, modern-day Iran. Citron has a pleasant fragrance and also has medicinal value, used for seasickness and other gastrointestinal symptoms.

The use of the variety of citron called the etrog to observe Sukkot (also called the Feast of Booths or Feast of Tabernacles) has its origins in Leviticus 23:40, where Israel is instructed to gather the "fruit of the goodly tree" and branches of specified trees.

The image with this question shows etrogs, which look a bit like oversized lemons with bumps. Another type of citron is the Buddha's hand, which appears as one would expect from the name, although it also looks much like an octopus or sea anemone.

In China, the Buddha's hand citron symbolizes happiness and long life, and in Japan it is often given at New Year's celebrations to bestow good luck over the next year.

Answer: False

Apple trees are angiosperms, with male and female structures that reproduce through cross pollination, needing pollen from one tree to be deposited in the blossom of another tree by bees and other creatures, so there's no predicting what sort of apple will be produced by a given tree.

Instead of planting seeds to get an apple of a particular quality, growers graft a small branch with buds from a tree that produces the desired fruit onto a tree that has hardy roots. The grafted branch - or scion - produces clones of apples from the original tree from which it was taken. If the rootstock grows its own branch, a different sort of apple might be produced.

The cloned fruit is the same as the original scion, but the seeds have their own genetic combination, which (like humans) may grow up to be like one parent or the other, or one of the grandparents, or a distant ancestor.

The sheer variety of apples in the wild is mind-boggling, just as human diversity is amazing when you think about it. Although we usually think of cloning as a modern - perhaps scary - invention, apple trees have been cloned for at least 2,000 years. Every apple we buy at the grocery store today shares DNA with the first apple of its variety.

Answer: Muscadine / Scuppernong

Vitis rotundifolia is the scientific name for the muscadine grape, which is native to the southeastern United States. Most varieties of muscadine grapes are dark purple, but they range in color from almost black to the golden green scuppernong, the lightest in color.

The "Mother Vine" on Roanoke Island - in what would have been Virginia to early colonists but is now North Carolina - still bears scuppernong grapes. The gnarled grapevine reaches around 60 feet into the air, has a trunk two feet in diameter, and covers about half an acre of land.

It is thought to be over 400 years old, and may be one of the grapevines reported by the earliest English explorers, Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, who were under the sponsorship of Sir Walter Raleigh when they touched land in 1584.

The vine was already old when it was first recorded in the 1720s. Cuttings from the Mother Vine were used to establish a vineyard in Rose Hill, North Carolina, that produces wine from this cultivar. The scuppernong grape is the official fruit of the state of North Carolina.

Answer: cranberry

Cranberries have been used for centuries in North America, first by Native Americans and later by settlers from other continents. They had medicinal value, especially as a preventative against scurvy for sea voyagers, but also as a treatment for arrow wounds.

They could be crushed and used as a dye. Native Americans also used mashed up cranberries as an ingredient for pemmican, a dried food that included fat and protein from deer meat. European settlers began making juice and harvesting cranberries in a more systematic way, inventing new scoops and other tools.

While juice was made from the time of the earliest English settlers, cranberry sauce was first marketed in 1912 in Massachusetts. Cranberries are grown in a number of states of the United States and provinces of Canada along the eastern seaboard of North America.

Their range is limited by the need for a specific environment: highly acid peat soil, plenty of fresh water, sand, and a cold winter followed by a growing season. Cranberries do not actually grow in water-filled fields, although they do need moisture.

However, the fields are flooded in the fall, when berries have ripened and turned red. Not only does the flooding make harvesting easier, but exposure to the sun when floating on top of the water is believed to enhance some of the healthy qualities of the cranberries for the humans who eat them or drink cranberry juice.

Answer: pear

This early medieval reference to pear trees indicates that they existed in England at least this early. In fact, pear seeds have been found in the excavation of the sites where ancient Alpine lake dwellers lived in prehistoric Europe. Greeks and Romans wrote about pears and their cultivation and use. Pears are mentioned in the "Odyssey" along with pomegranates, apples, figs, and olives. Pears also have a long history in Asia, perhaps 3,000 years. Asian pears are of a different but related variety to European pears, and they are sometimes called "apple pears" because of their shape and texture, although they are not a hybrid of the two. Belgians led the way to the development of many new varieties in the 18th century.

There are records of pears being sent from England to the early settlers of Massachusetts, and a pear tree planted by governor John Endicott in 1630 still stands - and produces fruit.

In 1997, a clone of the Endicott pear was produced as part of a United States Department of Agriculture program called the "National Clonal Germplasm Repository" that seeks to preserve and study plants used for crops.

Answer: Africa

Botanically speaking, the watermelon (Citrullus vulgaris) is classified as a berry - actually the kind of berry called a pepo - a fruit with a hard outer rind. Like their relatives cucumbers, citrons, and other melons, watermelons are cucurbits. Whatever its scientific classification, this nutritious, water-preserving fruit has been happily eaten by humans since prehistoric times. Egyptian images show the earliest historical example of a watermelon harvest around 2500 B.C., and there is evidence that watermelons were included with grave goods. Studies of the names for watermelons in different cultures reveal its antiquity, since names for it in Africa and Asia show no borrowing: scattered cultures had known of it separately for long periods of time.

The watermelon followed trade routes to India and China. They reached Europe and the Americas in the 1600s. In desert areas, watermelons served as sources of water during dry spells, and it is now believed to have first grown in southern Africa, in the Kalahari Desert. Watermelons are over 90% water.

Not only can desert dwellers forage for watermelons as a source of highly-nutritious food and clean water, they can even use their rind as containers. Africans brought to the Americas as slaves are thought to have brought the watermelon to the New World, where both European settlers and Native Americans cultivated them enthusiastically. Southern Russia grows a great many watermelons for export, also producing watermelon wine. In other areas, watermelon rind is pickled or seeds are roasted and eaten, even serving as flour. Once thought to have originated in Asia, they had never been seen growing wild anywhere on that continent. When missionary / explorer David Livingstone saw huge areas of land in Africa covered with watermelon vines growing wild, the mystery of its origins was settled.

Answer: prunes

Okay, you might have called them "disgusting" but you know that they were actually called "prunes" - right? One of the few things I remember about my great-grandmother, who was born in the 1880s, was that she had five stewed dried prunes or apricots for breakfast every morning to keep "regular" digestion.

It may have been this laxative quality that caused many children of the 20th century to avoid prunes, leading to the commercial preference for calling them "dried plums" to attract baby boomers and younger people. Prunes do aid digestion, because in addition to soluble fiber they contain compounds that help keep blood sugar levels balanced and give a sense of fullness that helps dieters.

They are high in antioxidants and are one of the best sources of vitamin K.

While prunes have many health benefits, they are not good for people who have certain kidney or gallbladder issues. Plums were first dried in the Caspian Sea region, where the European plum originated, but a large percentage in the 21st century are produced in the rich valleys and warm climate of southern California. Plums that are best for drying made their way to North America by way of France, grafted in 1856 by brothers Louis and Pierre Pellier, who had come to California during the gold rush. One of the funniest side stories in the history of plum agriculture was the attempt in the early 1900s, during a labor shortage, to have monkeys harvest the plums.

This didn't work, because the monkeys ate all the fruit they picked!

Answer: pewter plates

While tomato worms caused a brief scare in the 1830s and tomatoes long were considered safe only for human beings who lived in warm climates, a legitimate concern was the reaction of the acids in tomatoes to lead in pewter plates. However, poor people tended to use wooden plates or hardened bread crusts rather than pewter, so poor people were not subjected to lead poisoning when they ate tomatoes.

In his book "The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery" Andrew F. Smith refutes much of what we think we know about the history of the tomato, and his book contains recipes including tomatoes from the early 1800s.

It seems that many Europeans accepted the tomato as a good food, even during the years when the educated elite saw it as dangerous.

Italians around the city of Naples began using tomato sauce as a pizza topping in the 1880s. As with many foodstuffs, economic factors affected the tomato's classification; the tomato was variously classified as a fruit or a vegetable over the years in the United States for tax purposes, since vegetables were taxed but fruit was not. During the 1980s, news reports implied that the sweet tomato-based sauce ketchup had been classified as a vegetable for the purposes of complying with nutritional standards for school lunches in the United States.

It seems that ketchup was never specifically called a vegetable in the law, although the pickle relish that accompanied ketchup on hot dogs actually was explicitly mentioned as a vegetable in the legislation. The controversy revived in the 2000s, as pizza sauce was counted as a vegetable. As in its early days in Europe and North America, how the tomato and its products are classified has social and political ramifications.