History is an infinite ribbon of peel and it keeps unravelling, even after the groves are razed, the gods are dead, the villages are abandoned, and the books are written.

From east to west and west to east, the orange’s meaning has waxed and waned across time. It has, at once, been a creation of nature and of the laboratory, a symbol of Islam and Christianity, a luxury of European kings and Chinese emperors, an artificial commodity, a holy vessel, a ripe metaphor, a simple fruit.

In school, history is blinkered, and a nation’s complicity in the suffering of entire continents becomes yet another story to be regurgitated in exams, mythologised as glorious, and celebrated as inevitable.

I thought that time was linear, only ever moving away from the stories we call history. And then a bowl of oranges unravelled me.

When I was younger, I thought that one day I would find a sense of belonging, like it was an object on a supermarket shelf that I could buy and take home.

Is the cost worth the convenience of being able to walk into any supermarket anywhere in the world, in the summer or in the winter, and pick up a bundle of oranges? The answer to that question depends on whom you ask: the shopper, the supermarket CEO, or the picker in the grove.

How we treat food, the workers who pick it for us, and the land from which it is grown is a disaster.

The modern orange is a commodity that is squeezed through a system of exploitation and profit-making before reaching our fruit bowls at home.

Each of us inherits the past and we have to choose what to do with it.