On Christmas Eve, I walked into the Citrus Tower in Clermont, Florida, a former epicenter of the state’s orange production. Located in the northern part of the Lake Wales Ridge—a series of hills that stretches 100 miles across Central Florida—the 226-foot tower was unveiled in 1956 to celebrate what was then one of the state’s leading industries. Back then, the Ridge had one of the highest concentrations of orange trees in the world, and the tower annually drew an average of 500,000 tourists, who would gaze from its heights upon endless rows of thorny evergreens laden with white blossoms and glowing fruit. In the decades since—including in the 1990s, when I was growing up in Central Florida—oranges have been synonymous with the state, adorning license plates and tourism posters. Even now, the orange blossom is the state flower, and the orange is the state fruit.