Organic Dates: Perfectly Good; Not Hybridized Charlotte NC

Organic Dates: Perfectly Good; Not Hybridized

by Jaime Jones, The Date People

From Living Nutrition vol. 8

We sell the great majority of our dates to the Living Food Community, and we are asked many questions about our crop. One of the most commonly asked question is: "Which date varieties aren't hybridized?" Answer: No date varieties are hybridized.

When people first started asking this question about a year ago, it took me by surprise. In all my years of working in date farming I had never heard the words hybrid or hybridized used in reference to dates. The first thing I did was to get a dictionary and look up the word hybrid. This is Webster's definition: "An offspring of two animals or plants of different races, breeds, varieties, species or genera". When the word hybrid or hybridized is commonly used in reference to crops, it means a new variety which people have created by gathering pollen from one variety of plant and pollinating a different variety to create a new variety. For example, the tangelo was created by crossing a grapefruit for size with a tangerine for sweetness. Dates do not fall into that category. DATES ARE NOT HYBRIDIZED!! No one created the Medjool date or any other date variety. They were created in nature. Some “hybridized fruit” do not produce seeds. All dates have seeds and the date pits are extremely viable. Experiment yourself by planting a date pit in a container and placing it on a warm windowsill with adequate water.

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