Those of you old enough to remember would have completed the above by saying 'is like a day without sunshine'. But Alissa Hamilton's new book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice is likely to give you a new perspective about the orange juice you buy and serve your family.
No lightweight when it comes to the food industry, Ms. Hamilton has a doctorate in environmental studies from Yale University, a law degree from the University of Toronto and is a fellow with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, based in Minneapolis. Her particular area of interest is making the food industry and their systems more transparent to consumers.
The title of the book caught my attention for several reasons. First because I love orange juice, even though I've had to stop drinking it as it aggravates my arthritis. Ditto grapefruit juice. The second reason it caught my eye is because I've often wondered about the claim that the orange juice 'not from concentrate' sold in cartons and bottles is actually fresh. I mean how can a product be 'fresh' when it has a shelf life of two months? When I squeeze my own orange juice, it lasts at most two days before going bad. Yet when I read the carton label, all that has supposedly gone into the carton is 100% orange juice. So what gives?
A whole lot and by the sounds of it I had plenty of reason to wonder. That fresh squeezed taste, not to be mistaken for actual freshly squeezed juice, comes to your table after the juice has been pasteurized, stripped of oxygen and kept for up to a year in million gallon tanks to ensure a year round supply. Stripping the juice of oxygen prevents oxidation from occurring. Simply put it prevents spoilage. (Think of an apple; once you peel it you'd better eat it before it turns brown. That's oxidation). The problem with stripping the oxygen is that the process also removes the chemicals that give orange juice its flavor. So guess what? That flavor needs to be put back before the juice is packaged. How? By introducing flavor packs into the juice.
Flavor packs are produced by flavor companies; the same companies that provide flavoring for a whole host of products. Basically these companies chemically reproduce the flavors found in nature.
I was also quite surprised to learn that the majority of orange juice sold in North America comes not from Florida oranges but from Brazilian oranges. Cost has been cited as the main reason; there are fewer environmental regulations and wages are lower in Brazil than in Florida or California.
If I did still drink orange juice, after reading this book I'd forego the grocery store stuff, buy a bag of organic oranges and squeeze my own juice. Expensive? You bet! But worth every drop.
