Citrus in Fallout:
My hands are stained orange because I had to process a ton of citrus. There's a 5 litre jar with soon-to-be preserved lemon/mandarins/satsumas and a little container of yuzu kosho made with orange and lemon instead of yuzu.
While packing the jar and separating zest from pith, I began thinking about citrus in Fallout. Limes are mentioned in passing in Fallout 2 though they do not appear in game for player character use:
Punga fruit is possibly based on Buddha's hand citrus. That being said, it doesn't grow in Maryland, much less in the mashup of St. Mary's county/Ocean City, MD where Point Lookout is based. That said, the punga could be based on the idea of a mutated paw paw, which grows everywhere in the state, even in Baltimore city. Paw paws are also heavy and weigh down the stem, similar to the way punga are shown in-game. Maryland is also a place where you can cultivate some tropical plants, so maybe a seed was dropped at the right time when the bombs dropped and the climate changed?
Complicating matters: even Deezer's Lemonade in FO4? It's not made with lemons and has not been since the bombs.
Here's the lemonade recipe from Fallout 76 confirming the above: in-game lemonade in this game is not made with actual citrus, but acid.
There is, of course, Nuka-Cola Orange. But we don't have a recipe, perhaps implying that all the Nuka-Cola Orange around is remnants from the old world. Real-world equivalents like Orange Crush are made with high fructose corn syrup, "natural flavours" (likely oils from the peel + a blend of orange varietals), citric acid, sodium benzoate, gum arabic, and food colouring to create the syrup before it's mixed with a carbonation agent.
So: citrus in Fallout remains illusive!
I think anyone with a cool headcanon can take ahold of this and have fun with it! I would love to see what a naturalist or botanist more familiar with the genus than I thinks of what could happen to citrus in the Fallout universe.
