An email from the Clementine people in response to an email about "seedless Clementine oranges":
Thanks for letting us know about your experience with our oranges. We’re sorry to hear about your disappointment and appreciate the concern you shared about your child’s experience with the fruit. I’m sure it was frustrating to discover that your oranges had seeds in them after counting on them to be seedless. Interestingly, the USDA interprets “seedless,” in the context of a marketing term for oranges, to mean fewer than seven seeds. That’s because it is virtually impossible to control the seeded nature of oranges. Often, oranges with seeds are grown in groves adjacent to oranges without seeds, like the mandarins you mention. Bees will fly from blossom to blossom and cross-pollination can occur. Most of our clementines do not have seeds, but nature works against us sometimes.
Here is what they say at Wiki:
Clementines lose their desirable seedless characteristic when bees cross-pollinate them with other fruit. In early 2006 large growers such as Paramount Citrus in California threatened to sue local beekeepers for their bees' trespass into clementine crop land.
I cracked one of those bad boys open this morning and spit out 14 seeds! What does the USDA say about that? Something like "an average of less than 7 seeds"? I propose that if it is "virtually impossible to control the seeded nature of oranges" then you don't call them "seedless," which, in my world, means "without seeds."
It's kind-of like saying that my conference paper is "mindless," when, in fact, there are more than one but less than 7 minds per paper (if you fail to see the connection then you aren't thinking hard enough ;-> ).
