Orange You Glad It's Not Tropicana?
When I was a kid, my mom bought cans of frozen juice concentrate
from the grocery store, and we mixed it with water in a pitcher to make
our juice. Then, somewhere between junior high and high school, we,
like most people I knew at the time, switched over and started getting
cartons of seemingly-fancier not-from-concentrate OJ.
Why did we make the move? It's hard to say exactly, but we probably
thought the not-from-concentrate juice was closer to the real thing,
which is exactly what Tropicana and Minute Maid (and parent companies
PepsiCo and Coca-Cola) wanted us to think.
Nothing says "all-natural" like the orange with the striped straw
stabbed into it that serves as Tropicana's logo. The cartons tell us
that the orange stuff inside is "100% pure & natural orange juice,"
but as several industry experts have noted in the past year, so-called
"natural" not-from-concentrate orange juice is anything but.
Last May, Alissa Hamilton published Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice,
shining some light on the OJ industry. According to Hamilton, an
elaborate series of chemical procedures ensure that
not-from-concentrate orange juice doesn't spoil, which is partly why
it's more expensive. To store the juice, manufacturers strip it of
oxygen in a process known as "deaeration," which keeps it from
oxidizing.
Here's an explanation from a recent blog post Hamilton wrote:
"When the juice is stripped of oxygen it is also stripped of flavor
providing chemicals. Juice companies therefore hire flavor and
fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and
Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make
it taste fresh."
This seems odd, considering that many orange juice cartons say that
their product is "all natural," but according to Hamilton, juice
manufacturers are able to get away with it because the flavor packs are
technically derived from orange essence and oil. "Those in the industry
will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or
pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature," she writes.
Hamilton of course isn't saying that orange juice is unsafe because
it has artificial flavoring and fragrance; she's accusing them of false
advertising. However, in addition to being highly-processed, there's a
high carbon footprint attached to orange juice, because most of the
oranges are grown in Brazil (even though the manufacturers would have
us believe that they're all coming from Florida). According to the New York Times, "the equivalent of 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted to the atmosphere for each half-gallon carton of orange juice."
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