The Death of Orange Juice Snobbery, Or, Fresh Squeezed Tease?
(So I have to admit that from time to time when I name an entry I want to channel the writers of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.)
So Monday morning I sat in front of my computer, freshly showered after a run, with a bowl of granola and Simply Orange orange juice with mango- which I love because the flavor reminds me of something like sherbert.
And then I read this article, which I came across via Slog: Freshly Squeezed: The Truth About Orange Juice in Boxes.
And parts of my world came crashing down around me.
Feel free to read the article yourself, it isn't all that long, but the gist of it is that orange juice is stored two ways: as a concentrate or as a de-oxygenated liquid. Orange juice from concentrate says exactly that (Minute Maid, for example), juice that has de-oxygenated is referred to as "not from concentrate," because that's the non-specific truth.
When I buy orange juice for myself, I always get brands that aren't from concentrate (Tropicana, Simply Orange, Florida's Natural) because I genuinely think they taste better than the from concentrate brands.
Well, it turns out that that's not why I think they taste so good.
Here's the thing: the de-oxygenation process also strips the orange juice of its flavor. The companies then have their food scientists concoct "flavor packs" which are market-tested to know what Americans want their orange juice to taste like. These flavor packs are derived from actual oranges in one of those round-about sciencey ways, so they don't have to actually list them on the label.
So while I thought I was paying more for a better product, I really am just paying more for a better tasting product, in that I'm picking the brand with the better flavor packet.
For some people this is a huge turn off. Particularly because the article states that the de-oxygenated juice can sit in those tanks for like a year. So the only guarantee that the juice you've bought was actually fresh is if you buy it during prime orange season. Otherwise you'll have to track down your own Valencia oranges (they don't sell them at my local store) and juice your own.
I was sorely disappointed in the orange juice market when I read this. And yet I finished the cup I was drinking, though I did side-eye it a little. And I've continued drinking it nearly daily.
When talking to Kelly and Corey about it later (Kelly was aghast, Corey didn't want to know anything about it, because he didn't want his love of orange juice to be ruined), I likened it to a Doctor Who episode I saw where the Brits of the future live on a spaceship that can't possible be functional. When everyone gets to voting age, they learn the truth about the ship (it's actually built around a space whale, and they make it move by stimulating its pain center) and they have the choice to forget or protest (because the truth is awful, so you obviously can't know it without protesting how terrible it is). I do wish I could push the forget button on this whole thing.
Later Kelly sent me a link on facebook about how cellulose is a popular additive in stuff like shredded cheese- cellulose being wood pulp. Except, of course, because we're talking about crazy food science here, the wood pulp has been through all sort of lab transformations into something that isn't recognizable as wood pulp anymore, I guess. So Kelly's telling me now I have to stay away from orange juice and shredded cheese.
Full disclosure, I already do stay away from shredded cheese the bulk of the time, because I like how moist and wonderful freshly shredded cheese is from a block. But if I'm making a lasagna, I usually just grab pre-shredded stuff to make my life easier.
So now we come to the real issue here: what am I willing to eat?
I have made some healthy changes in my life. I avoid high fructose corn syrup, I try to cook a lot from scratch, I try to keep "healthy choices" around as snack food (this means gold fish crackers or hummus instead of a tablespoon of Nutella), but every time you turn around, something else you're eating is terrible.
The food industry is putting so many crazy fucking things in our food that there's no way you can avoid 100% of the time (in the article on cellulose, even Organic Valley was cited as a brand that uses it in their products). Even if I vowed to never buy a product with cellulose, for example, I could also never eat out, because I'm sure that plenty of restaurants pull out a huge bag of shredded cheese instead of shredding their own constantly.
I am fairly resolute about not buying products with high fructose corn syrup, but I love soda, and while I'm glad to buy sodas that have cane sugar in them, I go to restaurants, and I drink Sprite, and resign myself to the fact that I love soda more than dislike the prevalence of HFCS.
I could romanticize the whole "storing de-oxygenated orange juice in a vat for a year and then flavoring it for consumption" as a call back to our hunter-gatherer days when we salted and jerkied our meat to last us through those rough patches. Except I'm not going to suffer to any degree if I pass up orange juice I didn't see squeezed myself. I'm not going to even kid myself about the fact that I'm going to finish that bottle of orange juice, and once the squick wears off I'll buy another that isn't from concentrate, because the truth of the matter is I think it tastes better. I know I'm going to buy shredded cheese the next time a recipe calls for it, because it's going to be cheaper. The fact of the matter is as an American who has almost zero ties to how my food gets made when I'm not making it myself (and god, even then, lest we forget the E.coli spinach outbreak of 2006), I make concessions about how natural anything I eat is on a daily basis, and of the three I mentioned here there are scores I don't even know about.
Taking a moral stance on anything is... well it isn't quite a slippery slope. But once you give a shit to boycott/avoid one thing, it feels almost hypocritical not to boycott/avoid all the things.
And so my shitty rationalization is going to be this: if I am still willing to eat meat and drink products with HFCS from time to time, I guess I can also blithely continue to consume cellulose and flavor packs.
I'm pushing the forget button.
So Monday morning I sat in front of my computer, freshly showered after a run, with a bowl of granola and Simply Orange orange juice with mango- which I love because the flavor reminds me of something like sherbert.
And then I read this article, which I came across via Slog: Freshly Squeezed: The Truth About Orange Juice in Boxes.
And parts of my world came crashing down around me.
Feel free to read the article yourself, it isn't all that long, but the gist of it is that orange juice is stored two ways: as a concentrate or as a de-oxygenated liquid. Orange juice from concentrate says exactly that (Minute Maid, for example), juice that has de-oxygenated is referred to as "not from concentrate," because that's the non-specific truth.
When I buy orange juice for myself, I always get brands that aren't from concentrate (Tropicana, Simply Orange, Florida's Natural) because I genuinely think they taste better than the from concentrate brands.
Well, it turns out that that's not why I think they taste so good.
Here's the thing: the de-oxygenation process also strips the orange juice of its flavor. The companies then have their food scientists concoct "flavor packs" which are market-tested to know what Americans want their orange juice to taste like. These flavor packs are derived from actual oranges in one of those round-about sciencey ways, so they don't have to actually list them on the label.
So while I thought I was paying more for a better product, I really am just paying more for a better tasting product, in that I'm picking the brand with the better flavor packet.
For some people this is a huge turn off. Particularly because the article states that the de-oxygenated juice can sit in those tanks for like a year. So the only guarantee that the juice you've bought was actually fresh is if you buy it during prime orange season. Otherwise you'll have to track down your own Valencia oranges (they don't sell them at my local store) and juice your own.
I was sorely disappointed in the orange juice market when I read this. And yet I finished the cup I was drinking, though I did side-eye it a little. And I've continued drinking it nearly daily.
When talking to Kelly and Corey about it later (Kelly was aghast, Corey didn't want to know anything about it, because he didn't want his love of orange juice to be ruined), I likened it to a Doctor Who episode I saw where the Brits of the future live on a spaceship that can't possible be functional. When everyone gets to voting age, they learn the truth about the ship (it's actually built around a space whale, and they make it move by stimulating its pain center) and they have the choice to forget or protest (because the truth is awful, so you obviously can't know it without protesting how terrible it is). I do wish I could push the forget button on this whole thing.
Later Kelly sent me a link on facebook about how cellulose is a popular additive in stuff like shredded cheese- cellulose being wood pulp. Except, of course, because we're talking about crazy food science here, the wood pulp has been through all sort of lab transformations into something that isn't recognizable as wood pulp anymore, I guess. So Kelly's telling me now I have to stay away from orange juice and shredded cheese.
Full disclosure, I already do stay away from shredded cheese the bulk of the time, because I like how moist and wonderful freshly shredded cheese is from a block. But if I'm making a lasagna, I usually just grab pre-shredded stuff to make my life easier.
So now we come to the real issue here: what am I willing to eat?
I have made some healthy changes in my life. I avoid high fructose corn syrup, I try to cook a lot from scratch, I try to keep "healthy choices" around as snack food (this means gold fish crackers or hummus instead of a tablespoon of Nutella), but every time you turn around, something else you're eating is terrible.
The food industry is putting so many crazy fucking things in our food that there's no way you can avoid 100% of the time (in the article on cellulose, even Organic Valley was cited as a brand that uses it in their products). Even if I vowed to never buy a product with cellulose, for example, I could also never eat out, because I'm sure that plenty of restaurants pull out a huge bag of shredded cheese instead of shredding their own constantly.
I am fairly resolute about not buying products with high fructose corn syrup, but I love soda, and while I'm glad to buy sodas that have cane sugar in them, I go to restaurants, and I drink Sprite, and resign myself to the fact that I love soda more than dislike the prevalence of HFCS.
I could romanticize the whole "storing de-oxygenated orange juice in a vat for a year and then flavoring it for consumption" as a call back to our hunter-gatherer days when we salted and jerkied our meat to last us through those rough patches. Except I'm not going to suffer to any degree if I pass up orange juice I didn't see squeezed myself. I'm not going to even kid myself about the fact that I'm going to finish that bottle of orange juice, and once the squick wears off I'll buy another that isn't from concentrate, because the truth of the matter is I think it tastes better. I know I'm going to buy shredded cheese the next time a recipe calls for it, because it's going to be cheaper. The fact of the matter is as an American who has almost zero ties to how my food gets made when I'm not making it myself (and god, even then, lest we forget the E.coli spinach outbreak of 2006), I make concessions about how natural anything I eat is on a daily basis, and of the three I mentioned here there are scores I don't even know about.
Taking a moral stance on anything is... well it isn't quite a slippery slope. But once you give a shit to boycott/avoid one thing, it feels almost hypocritical not to boycott/avoid all the things.
And so my shitty rationalization is going to be this: if I am still willing to eat meat and drink products with HFCS from time to time, I guess I can also blithely continue to consume cellulose and flavor packs.
I'm pushing the forget button.