When life hands you lemons, you know what to do:

Squeeze the bejeebers out of them and make juice.

Unless The Mysterious Case Of The Vanishing Lemon Juice is solved mighty soon, that's about the only way you'll get any for a while.

It's become as precious a commodity as crude.

"I'm wondering where all the lemon juice is," pondered "Winnipeg" on the bargain-hunting site RedFlagDeals.com. "It's like I'm the only person who has noticed that there has been no lemon juice for three weeks."

Well no, Pegger, you're not.

"I've been to No Frills, Fortinos and UltraMart in Burlington," read another post, "all are out of stock of lemon juice."

From British Columbia to Nova Scotia, Canadians are having trouble finding any ReaLemon juice or a reasonable facsimile.

"Am I the last person in Kamloops to discover the world-wide lemon juice shortage?" asked a columnist in the local paper.

In Halifax, after checking Costco, the Atlantic Superstore and Sobeys, a local restaurant owner concluded "there's something going on with the lemon juice."

Yes, indeed, there is. But nobody seems to know quite what or why.

When we checked late last week, there was no bottled lemon juice at the Upper Ottawa Street Barn, Sobeys at Meadowlands, Tony's Food Basics at Centennial Parkway, the A&P in Dundas, Price Chopper on Fennell Avenue East, Longo's in Burlington or Farmer Al's on Rymal Road East, and that's just for starters.

Rare sightings have been reported at Costco and the occasional corner mart. There seem to be a few of those little plastic lemons around, and everybody has pyramids of big, juicy, yellow lemons. But bottled product is as scarce as a Lemon Drop martini without a drop of lemon.

Ask why and the answer will be along the lines of "I don't know, we haven't had any for weeks," or "we can't get it and nobody knows why," or "something to do with the crop, I think."

Go higher and the answers are just as vague.

At the head offices of Sobeys Ontario and Metro Ontario, which owns A&P, Dominion, The Barn, Ultra, Food Basics and Loeb, they'd never even heard of any shortage until queried by a sleuthing reporter with a deerstalker hat and a calabash pipe.

Kim McKinnon of the Canadian Council of Grocery Distributors said "I'm having the same trouble.

"I don't think we know the root. We've got tons of lemons, no problem there, but we haven't been alerted to any short- or long-term issues about lemon juice."

Colleague Cathy Gell says the CCGD is "looking into this."

"We don't have any answers right now," she said. "This has just been brought to our attention in the last little while. We have gone out to members to see if they know anything.

"I've also checked with the Food and Consumer Products of Canada, who are the manufacturing side, and they don't have any answers on this either."

The plot thickens.

Steve Flanagan is the senior buyer at Flanagan Foodservice in Kitchener, which supplies wholesalers such as Hamilton's National Grocers Cash & Carry.

Before leaving on holidays, he wrote up an e-mail for customers on the lemon juice trail:

"We have recently been informed of an availability issue on lemon concentrate due to weather conditions impacting the most recent lemon crop.

"This is a global raw material shortage that will impact our ability to supply ReaLemon to our customers. As a result, a limited number of items in our ReaLemon portfolio will be temporarily out of stock through September."

An unofficial spokesperson for the California Citrus Growers, who didn't want to be named, laid the blame for the missing juice at the highest level:

"God Himself did it," he said, citing a crop freeze last year.

Incredibly, the California Citrus Mutual, a trade association of citrus growers, didn't have a clue.

Finally, our sniffer dog managed to root out Claire Smith, director of corporate communications for Sunkist Growers in Southern California, where 80 per cent of the lemons grown are sold as whole fruit. Only 20 per cent goes to juice because "our fruit is very pretty and cosmetically appealing," she said. And Florida's major crop is oranges, not lemons.

Most of the lemons used to produce juice for North America are grown off-continent. Argentina, a huge lemon producer, was hit with a major freeze in the winter of 2007/08. European growers of juice lemons faced droughts and scirocco winds during the same season.

"All the world's citrus areas were hard hit. It was a short crop all over," she said. "It was a perfect storm globally for lemons this year."

The supply of juice lemons was drastically reduced and the demand remained steady. The supply of fruit lemons was smaller, but enough to meet the demand.

So there are lots of lemons, but no bottled juice until fall when the new crop comes in.

"You've got lemon juice," said Smith. "You just have to squeeze it."

Elementary, my dear Watson.

mnolan@thespec.com

905-526-4689