The following interview with Alissa Hamilton originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Acres USA:It’s not widely known that orange juice benefits from a gap of sorts in the industrial agriculture catalog of chemical horrors. Ninety percent of the pesticides used on citrus are used to preserve appearance, and appearance is not an issue for oranges that are destined for converting into juice. That’s the good news. The not-so-good news can be found below, where author Alissa Hamilton serves up a sampling of her fascinating book on the orange juice industry, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice. Like many other elements of our food heritage, the juice of the most beloved citrus has emerged from a century of marketing and processing as something completely transformed, a troubled descendant of what it was. Once a luxury served in affluent homes and enjoyed seasonally by farm families with access to their own trees, most of the orange juice consumed by Americans today is the result of a fairly bizarre process. But let’s give the floor to Alissa Hamilton and her thorough research.
ACRES U.S.A. Let’s say you go into a store to buy orange juice, and your best option is something that says “fresh-squeezed” or words to that effect on the label. What is in that orange juice?
ALISSA HAMILTON. There aren’t too many products recently that actually advertise their processed juice as fresh-squeezed. They certainly suggest it, imply it by the pictures on the carton or the ads you see on TV, but those two words together, fresh, squeezed — hopefully companies have stopped doing that. That said, Tropicana’s new carton actually had a statement at the top: “squeezed from fresh oranges.” So you can see the extent to which companies are still trying to convince consumers — that sounds awfully like fresh-squeezed, but clearly it means something different. We would hope that the oranges that they squeeze are fresh when squeezed.
ACRES U.S.A. They’ll say “squeezed from fresh oranges,” or they’ll say “not from concentrate.” What does that mean, really?
HAMILTON. “Not from concentrate” refers to a pasteurized orange juice, and this is sort of complicated because you usually see the words “not from concentrate” in much larger font than the word “pasteurized.” The industry fought hard not to have to declare on the carton that the juice was pasteurized because they were concerned that consumers would be turned off. What usually happens today is that in order to have a 365-day supply of orange juice, the big brands are storing their product for up to a year. They store them in these huge aseptic storage tanks — that means the juice is stripped of oxygen before going into the tank so that it doesn’t oxidize in the tank and go bad. When the juice is stripped of oxygen, it is also stripped of flavor-providing chemicals. The companies then hire flavor and fragrance companies to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh. You can see in the name the whole idea behind the slogan “not from concentrate” — it is a better, higher-quality, fresher juice than from concentrate, with the idea that from-concentrate is an inferior product. But in fact, not-from-concentrate juice is also a heavily processed product. Many of the ads show the oranges being squeezed and then going right into the carton or a straw punctured into an orange suggesting that this is pretty much straight from the tree, but it’s not.
To continue reading this interview, please click here.
