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I've been an apple guy for as long as I can remember. It all started in early childhood with the red delicious variety, a staple of my preschool snacks and later sack lunches. As years when by, I explored golden delicious, granny smith, Jonathan, and Rome apples; finally, a few years ago, I settled on the gala variety as my old standby apple. I saw no need to switch varieties again, but recently the Fuji apple, with its snappier texture and more complex flavors, has caught my attention.

Before making the switch, though, I thought this might be a good time to check out an alternative fruit, the orange. Now, oranges aren't nearly as popular as apples, so you may not have heard of them; but these strange wonders of the fruit kingdom (hailing originally from Asia, but now grown in the tropics worldwide) have been around for quite some time and attained a small but loyal fanbase.

So, to appease my curiosity, and the imploring of a few of my orange-eating friends, I decided to take the plunge and replace my weekly supply of apples with a bag of oranges. I'd spend a week with oranges, and write about my experiences here.

Day One: A rough start...

Like apples, oranges come in several varieties. In fact, it turns out there are a whole slew of orange-like fruits known as the citrus family which can be had in a wide variety of colors and shapes. This alone was a little intimidating; but after looking around the produce section a bit it seemed that navel oranges (despite the humorous name) are the most popular variety, so it made sense to buy a bag and make sweeping generalizations about the entire citrus family based on my experience with them. After all, the navel wouldn't be the most popular if it wasn't the best!

I arrived home with my bag of oranges just at lunch time, so without further ado I broke open the bag and dug in. I removed the sticker, rinsed off the orange, gave it a quick polish, and bit off my first taste.

Ugh. It was AWFUL! The outer skin was tough, leathery, and dry, with a bitter, stale taste. I couldn't believe how bad it was. I mean, I didn't expect it to be as sweet as a ripe gala, but this was the worst thing I'd ever tasted.

I almost gave up then and there, but I reminded myself that oranges wouldn't get such ardent recommendation if they really tasted this bad. It was time to get help.

I fired up my web browser and went to the nearest orange-eater website; there, I located the newbie forum and introduced myself. I explained that this was my first time eating oranges, and what I thought about them. What followed were a lot of questions -- what kind of oranges had I, how had I prepared them, were they rotten, was I rotten, something about my parentage, etc etc.

Well, after a few hundred posts and some help from the forum moderators, I found out that oranges need to be peeled before they are eaten. I made a point to the forum members that this was strange, since I'd never had to peel an apple for plain eating, and wondered if orange producers were working on fixing this unfortunate feature; but this comment just got everyone upset all over again. Touchy bunch! (as an aside -- this sort of elitist attitude seems to be a really problem for the orange-eating community; they really need to get rid of the "bad apples" in the community if they expect oranges to get any traction in the mainstream!)

Unfortunately, I'd already tossed day one's orange in the trash, so peeling it was out of the question for today. Besides, my appetite was gone. So I'd try again tomorrow.

Day Two: Digging deeper

As apple eaters know, you don't have to peel an apple to eat it raw. Nevertheless, it's sometimes helpful if you're cooking apples or giving them to small children, so we're stocked with a variety of sophisticated peeling apparatus. I myself have a top of the line electric peeler/corer which can skin an apple perfectly in less than a minute.

Naturally, then, it made sense to use it for peeling the hideous rind off today's orange.

WRONG.

Apparently oranges are just not compatible with my peeler. After the first five minutes, I was only barely able to get the finest layer of that waxy leather off the outside of the orange. After ten minutes, I was starting to get worried that my peeler was going to burn out, so I stopped.

No problem, then; we have other tools for this job. I got out the old hand peeler and got to work. It was murder trying to get through that tough skin, and by the time I got to the juicy bit underneath I had a real mess on my hands.

I was just about done getting a tough bit off the end when my tight grip was just too much for the flabby fruit and I squashed my thumb right through it. Well, enough was enough; even if I had managed to get the last bit of skin off, I couldn't have brought myself to eat this mangled thing. I would not be eating any orange on day two.

Day Three: Third day's a charm

By the morning of the third day, I was feeling severely vitamin-C deprived and starting to fear the onset of scurvy. I knew it was time to get some serious help and get this orange thing figured out, or else I'd have to give up and go back to apples.

So this time I went back to the forums; I described my whole situation, everything I'd tried, and made sure to point out that if I couldn't get help, I'd have no choice but to give up and go back to apples. I demanded a detailed explanation of what I should do with these oranges.

I got a lot of suggestions, most of which I cannot repeat in a family-friendly context. Well, I would have given up at that point were it not for a kind soul who walked me through the orange-eating process step-by-step. As it turns out, the best way to remove the peel from an orange is with a knife.

I was a little taken aback by this. Knives are old fashioned, not to mention dangerous. Sure, there are times when taking a knife to an apple is warranted, but we have so many advanced tools for sculpting the apple -- slicers, peelers, corers -- that I felt I was being thrust back into the stone-age.

Even so, I followed the advice and sliced around the outside skin from end to end. I carefully worked off the peel in strips, and then pulled a long string of white, Nerf-like fiber from the core of the orange.

And now, the first pleasant surprise of my entire orange experience: the thing was pre-cut! I couldn't believe it; no slicer required, just take off the peel and there are eight neat slices, ready to be torn apart as easily as perforated toilet tissue.

"Maybe I'm starting to understand this orange thing," I think to myself, "Maybe this is what all the orange fanatics are on about!"

In wonderment, I tore off my first peeled slice of orange and sunk in my teeth.

The taste of victory.

Wonderment died on my lips. Or should I say, my tongue. I couldn't believe how harsh this thing tasted; biting into the fibrous, filmy flesh of the orange flooded my mouth with an acidic liquid so tart that henceforth I shall refer to granny smith apples as "Little curly-haired doe-eyed Miss Smith" apples.

There was sweetness to the taste, don't get me wrong. But it was juxtaposed with a mouth-puckering sourness that burned in my stomach the rest of the day, and the texture was outlandish.

Close inspection of the bitten-off slice revealed that it was no so much a "slice" as a bag of tiny tadpole-looking arils mashed together like cheese curds -- nothing at all like the smooth consistent grain of an apple.

Things get worse...

I'd come too far to give up after one bite, though, so I muscled through a few more nibbles. Gradually I gained a bit more appreciation for the taste; certainly it had a fragrance all its own, if more brutish than the apple and with occasional unpleasant notes.

Just as I was coming to terms with the taste, however, I ran straight into a hard spot -- literally. I crunched right down on an orange seed.

Every natural fruit has seeds, of course; that's the whole purpose of a fruit, from the plant's perspective. Even apples have them. So admittedly, I should have known that somewhere in that tart little orb a seed or two would be hiding. I suppose I had been hoping that they were stowed away in that mass of peel and whitish junk I'd ripped off the outside and core of the orange. Silly me.

No, unlike an apple, which keeps it small collection of seeds in a neat hollow bit in the core -- colored high-contrast to the flesh of the fruit so they're easy to find -- orange seeds float in virtual armadas randomly stationed beneath the skin of each wedge. OK, usually they congregate toward the sharp edge, at the center of the orange; but since they're shaded yellow-white with only the slightest hint of gray, distinguishing them visually from the rest of the fruit flesh is nearly impossible.

I did my best to try to remove all the seeds from the rest of the wedges before eating any more; not only did this take a ridiculous amount of time and make a complete mess of my nice neat wedges, but even after careful searching I managed to miss two or three.

On the good side, I did get my vitamin C and fructose for the day, but over all the experience was a disaster.

Day four: Pie in this guy

It was day four, and with less than half the week at my backside and most of a bag of oranges remaining, I decided it was time for drastic measures.

So far I had only tasted oranges raw, and -- while a good gala apple requires no more dressing than a quick rinse and polish -- I've certainly made lesser fruits shine with a bit of assistance. It takes a pretty bad apple to ruin an apple pie, after all. With that thought, I grabbed my best apple pie recipe and the remaining oranges and headed for the kitchen.

Prepping oranges for a pie is no mean task, let me tell you. It took me over an hour to skin and seed enough oranges, not counting the time I spent writhing in agony after slicing open the tip of my orange-juice-soaked finger with the paring knife. I managed to get through it, though, and, adding my sugar, spices, and flour, popped it into the oven.

The pie came out of the oven looking promising, a perfectly brown top crust with caramelized sugar bubbling from the steam vents. The smell wasn't bad either; the effervescent citrus smell blended nicely with the cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. Maybe this was it! Maybe now I'd arrived at pure orange bliss.

I thought so, until I cut into the pie. What came out of the pan -- in so many scoop-fulls -- was a sloppy wet mess of ropy pulp. The fruit had not congealed, nor had its tough fibery bits broken down. On top of this, the acidic juice combined with the spices and heat turned out to be a perfect recipe for heartburn. What I experienced tossing and turning in bed that night -- never mind the next morning -- will be long remembered.

Day Five: Get back, mac(intosh)

OK, I said I'd do a week with oranges. But after the incident with the pie ("disaster" is too kind a word), I could take no more. I made a special trip to the grocery and picked up a bag of Fujis. Back to that crisp, snappy sweetness -- I confess, I ate three of them just for lunch, and another two for dinner to make up for the lost days of my apple-eating life.

I figured it would be completely unfair -- borderline criminal -- not to share my experiences with those who had so kindly helped me on the orange-eaters forum. Surely my wisdom as a long-time "mainstream" fruit lover would be invaluably instructive to these people.

I wrote a lengthy and detailed post, but my points were essential this: first, that oranges needed to lose the thick peel, and go for a thinner and more edible peel; next, that a smoother and more consistent inner texture would be better (the pre-sliced thing is nice, but I think it's not worth having all that pulpy fiber inside); finally, a sweeter and less acidic taste -- something more compatible with common apple recipes -- would go a long way toward making oranges as appealing as apples. I considered this helpful, constructive criticism that orange growers and supporters could use in breeding or demanding a better orange. You'd think a community of people looking to better the orange in the world would be appreciative of my time and effort in blessing them with my valuable point of view.

No such thing; in reply, I received the usual sorts of excuses -- suggestions that I'd got the wrong variety or quality of citrus fruit, or that the things I was saying were impossible, or that I prepared them incorrectly; some suggested recipes to try, or places where I could get orange products pre-made by expert chefs, or that I was plain barking mad. Sorry, but I just don't see the point now, when much better fruit is readily available. Anyway, it's clear the orange-eating community is plagued with a population of zealots too busy sticking their heads in the sand to try to effectively reach out to people like me.

Conclusions

I know I will make some orange-eaters unhappy when I say it, but oranges just aren't ready for prime time. They require too much effort to eat, don't taste as good, aren't compatible with apple-prepping tools, and just plain don't work in apple recipes.

In short, oranges are horrible apples and I'll be recommending to my friends and family to steer clear.

Alan Moore writes stuff for computers, stuff for humans about computers, and sometimes stuff about humans for humans or computers.