Squeezed

Alissa Hamilton on the Dr. Oz Show

Last week, Alissa Hamilton appeared on the Dr. Oz Show for an interview segment, "Is Your Orange Juice Safe?" Watch the show online and read below her responses to the questions of Juice: What You Need to Know.

To ensure that your orange juice is not tainted by contaminants, Dr. Oz recommends looking "for orange juice made only with oranges grown in the US."  However, just because an orange juice label doesn't say the carton contains orange juice from other countries doesn't mean it doesn't contain orange flavoring material from other countries.

It's important to remember that the flavor packs going into orange juice are not derived from the same oranges that are squeezed to make that batch of orange juice. As I mentioned on the show, Brazil is the world leader in orange production. That means it is also a leading supplier of orange flavoring material. So even if your carton of orange juice doesn't contain orange juice from Brazil, it still may contain flavoring material from Brazil, flavoring material that is made up of essential oils that are extracted from the orange peel where the banned fungicide Carbendazim accumulates. 

Unfortunately it is impossible for the consumer to know whether their orange juice contains flavoring material from Brazil because the orange juice companies have actively fought to avoid disclosure on the label of the addition of flavor packs.

 

Food Chain Radio: "Squeezed Fresh"

Alissa Hamilton was interviewed on Food Chain Radio's October 17th show, entitled "Squeezed Fresh." Click here to listen to the full interview and see below for the show description:

It’s pure, and natural, and squeezed fresh. And so we buy the orange juice and drink it to break our fast and start our day. Still, we wonder… What do they mean by "squeezed fresh?" Topics include a history of how orange juice became a staple of the American breakfast; the technologies that make it possible to get juice from oranges off the tree in Brazil and onto a table in Peoria; and how juice a year old can be sold to us as squeezed fresh.

Writers Read

The following piece by Alissa Hamilton originally appeared on Writers Read:

It's summertime, the season for a great romance, thriller, or mystery, whether read between covers or viewed on the big screen. And yet all I seem to be reading these days is non-fiction, the film equivalent of the documentary, which you might think is more fall/winter appropriate. Think again. Docs can be entertaining: remember March of the Penguins, when the two pudgy penguins too impatient to wait their turn get momentarily stuck, Abbot and Costello style, in the hole in the ice on their way fishing?

Similarly, Non-fiction can be gripping. I'm going to take a chance and pick Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life as proof. I confess I have not read this year-in-the-life, but it's on my shelf, next in line. Kingsolver, who appropriately made her name writing delicious fiction (The Bean Trees was her first novel), begins Animal, Vegetable, Miracle with an elaborate drawing of an every-vegetable-plant followed by the evocation:

Picture a single imaginary plant,
bearing throughout one season all the
different vegetables we harvest...
we'll call it a vegetannual

With a start like this, I'm confident it won't disappoint. Especially since squash, which may be my single most favourite vegetable, crowns the drawing.

If you're more in the mood for a thriller, I recommend A Question of Intent: A Great American Battle With a Deadly Industry, by David Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration. Kessler was largely responsible for exposing and cracking down on the tobacco industry. Although the book was published in 2001, it is timely given a recent article co-authored by Kelly Brownell, Yale psychologist and author of Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It, and Kenneth Warner, tobacco researcher and Dean of the University of Michigan's School of Public Health, about the similarities in the marketing tactics used by the food and tobacco industries.

Hot docs for what I hear is going to be a hot summer.

Effecting change one orange at a time

The following article by Tim Wilbur originally appeared in the June 12th edition of the Lawyer's Weekly:

Have you ever wondered how they make orange juice? If you are like most people, you probably thought there was nothing to wonder about. Oranges are squeezed, and then they are either put into a container (the “not from concentrate” stuff), or the water is extracted from the juice to make the frozen orange juice you buy at your local grocery store. Simple, natural, pure, right?

Wrong! Alissa Hamilton’s new book, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice, published by Yale University Press, sets out to debunk many of the common misconceptions about how “pure” orange juice really is, particularly the “not from concentrate” (NFC) kind.

Hamilton exposes the reality of the NFC process, including the use of “flavour packs,” in which the elements of oranges are altered and reconstituted, and then reintroduced into the juice after the juice has gone through an extensive pasteurization process that kills all of the original orange flavour. The orange juice industry feels that it can describe its product as 100 percent juice, since the flavour packs are derived from oranges, but Hamilton thinks this is stretching the truth. Even the most creative lawyer would likely agree. “This product obviously needs manipulation. It is not an orange with the straw through it, that is not what you are getting.”

Being a lawyer herself, Hamilton is not just interested in providing an investigative piece about the seedy underbelly of this industry. She has plenty to say about the regulation of orange juice, and food in general. She provides a lawyerly analysis of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) rules about what is considered an “ingredient” and therefore must be listed on the container. Flavour packs, given how considerably altered they are from the original orange elements, Hamilton argues, are clearly “ingredients.”

The reason they are not listed on orange juice boxes is not so much a function of the law, but of a lack of enforcement, Hamilton says. “Part of the problem is the FDA and Health Canada are regulating drugs and that is their priority and orange juice is a relatively benign product.”

But not enforcing rules because a product doesn’t do direct harm to a person is adhering to a simplistic understanding of health, Hamilton argues. She looks at the effects of the orange juice industry’s practices, including its use of mostly Brazilian, and not Floridian, oranges, on the health of the environment and agricultural workers.

And even if the FDA and Health Canada don’t care to see health in this broad manner, many consumers surely do — if only they could get truthful information about how their food is produced. “I think people do care how their food is produced, they just are so removed from it that they are making decisions based on what industry is telling them, based on marketing, rather than based on real, accurate information.”

Hamilton has recently completed her PhD in forestry and environmental studies at Yale University (Squeezed grew out of her thesis) and is currently a food and society policy fellow at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis (although she lives in Toronto).

Her book is just one attempt to help inform consumers about the process, and not just the ingredients, that are part of the foods they eat. “We tend to take it for granted that (we) have a right to know what is in food, but (we) know very little about how it is produced.”

Hamilton graduated from the University of Toronto’s law school in 1998 and articled at Gowling, Strathy, and Henderson, now called Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP. She says her legal background helped her “develop policy, analyze regulations, be able to look at legislation and regulations and understand the legal framework and how we might improve it” for the environment.

She thought perhaps she would work as an environmental lawyer, but quickly decided she did not want to be just interpreting legislation — she wanted to be effecting policy change on a broader scale. “I think I am practising [law] right now, in my own way.”

If people are shocked at how complicated the production of something as simple as orange juice is, then who knows what other food production processes we take for granted. “The more we demand information, truthful information, the more hope there is that things will change.”

Nudging Nudge into the Supermarket

This article by Alissa Hamilton was originally distributed on the Foodforethought listserv.

Ever wondered why breakfast without OJ seems incomplete? If you thought about it you might say orange juice is a good source of vitamin C, or it's part of a balanced breakfast. These answers would put you in the company of Edmund Burke, who believed that traditions grow out of generations of wisdom.    

In a footnote to their new book Nudge:  Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein challenge the Burkean assumption that social practices necessarily arise from the tried and true judgments of people over time.  The authors offer a different explanation for many of the long-standing practices we engage in each day: the nudge factor. They could have used the convention of drinking orange juice for breakfast as an example.

Nudge's premise is that we, unlike the rational actors upon which the legitimacy of traditional economics depends, do not always act in our best interest. The authors highlight a major reason why: "people tend to be somewhat mindless, passive decision makers." They thus maintain that we could often use a nudge in the right direction. The meat of the book tackles the difficult questions how we can be, and when we should be nudged.

To answer how we may be and are nudged, Thaler and Sunstein introduce the "choice architect," whom they define as the person/people responsible for "organizing the context in which people make decisions." They choose Carolyn, the director of food services for a city school system, to illustrate.  They explain how Carolyn's decision to put the apples or French fries at eye level organizes the context in which students select what to have for lunch.

The example got me thinking more about how Nudge applies to the choices we make about the foods we commonly buy.  Having spent the past few years researching the rise in popularity of commercial orange juice, I read the book with juice in particular on my mind. The package designer is the Carolyn of the orange juice world. It is not by chance that most orange juice comes to us in milk cartons. Back when milk symbolized freshness, processed orange juice manufacturers chose the milk carton as a way of saying our product is fresh too.  Even though it wasn't, the association was generated and the context for making decisions about orange juice created.

To answer the second question, when we need to be nudged, the authors conclude that:  "people are most likely to need nudges for decisions that are difficult, complex, infrequent, and when they have poor feedback and few opportunities for learning." They extrapolate: "We are more likely to need more help picking the right mortgage than choosing the right loaf of bread."  They thus implicitly set the difficulty of the mortgage decision as a kind of threshold for meeting the first criterion, thereby effectively dismissing the grocery list from their discussion of when nudges are needed. Here the authors ought to be nudged to think twice.  

Perhaps having been primed—a term the authors use for the power that a "hint" of an idea can have in triggering associations that affect behavior—by advertising, Thaler and Sunstein falsely assume that choosing the right loaf of bread is relatively simple. But even the seemingly most straightforward supermarket foods are more complex than we might imagine.  Take orange juice again as an example. 

For starters, most of us think Florida when we think orange juice. One airline steward told me he gets far more requests for orange juice on flights to Florida.  The truth is most orange juice comes from Brazil. According to statistics published by the Florida Department of Citrus, Brazil produces almost three times as many oranges as Florida.   The majority of these oranges are processed into juice for export. Many of us also believe ads that say orange juice is  "100% pure" and "natural." But even "Pure Premium Not From Concentrate" is heated, stripped of flavor, kept in storage for up to a year, and then re-flavored before packaging. 

Although the decision we face as we stand in front of the innumerable types of orange juice in the refrigerator section of the supermarket appears easy, it isn't.  And the repercussions of our decision are not inconsequential. A big reason why orange juice production has moved to Brazil is wages there are low. Suddenly the morning glass of orange juice doesn't look so sunny when we realize it is the product of backbreaking labor rather than the paradise we see in OJ ads on T.V.

Thaler and Sunstein acknowledge that eating is "one of the most mindless activities we do." They leave out buying food, which is up there too. While the former leads to overeating, the latter is equally unhealthy. Mindless buying means we may choose foods we would not, if we knew more, want to, whether for philosophical, health, or ethical reasons. 

Returning to the initial question why so many of us drink orange juice for breakfast, Thaler and Sunstein have news for the Burke-styled traditionalists among you:  our actions and decisions are not as deliberate as you might expect. In the aforementioned footnote the authors observe that social practices "often persist not because they are wise but because . . . [i]nertia, procrastination, and imitation often drive our behavior." They further note that some traditions "can last for a long time, and receive support or at least acquiescence from large numbers of people, even though it was originally the product of a small nudge from a few people or perhaps even one."

The orange juice-for-breakfast routine is a case in point.  Almost all of America and much of the world drink orange juice because of the nudges of a few rather than the collective wisdom of many. The first nudge came from the Florida Citrus Exchange, a grower organization that evolved at the turn of the twentieth century to deal with Florida's chronic surplus of oranges.  The Exchange initiated a program whereby it distributed juice extractors on a premium basis to households across the nation to encourage people to drink their oranges and thus consume more of them.  Next came a nudge from the Quartermaster Corps, which needed a convenient way to send vitamin C to troops overseas during World War II.  Thanks to funding from the federal government and Florida state, Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice ("FCOJ") was born in 1948.  Too late for the war, FCOJ arrived just in time for a civilian society warming to the convenience of frozen foods. The final nudge came from advertising. Bing Crosby began crooning Minute Maid's FCOJ into the hearts of Americans and before long the nation was won over.  According to the USDA Economic Research Service, in 1940, before the invention of FCOJ, per capita consumption of orange juice was 0.08 gallons.  By 1950 it had grown exponentially to 0.93 gallons. Today per capita consumption hovers around five gallons.  

We may say we drink orange juice because it's a good source of vitamin C. It is for soldiers on the battlefront without access to fresh fruits and vegetables. For the rest of us there are many fresh fruits and vegetables, a whole medium orange for one, which boast more vitamin C than a glass of processed orange juice.

Thaler and Sunstein write, "imitation" and "inertia" often drive our behavior. The story of OJ shows how marketing does too.  There is no contesting the authors' "bottom line:" "people are, shall we say, nudge-able."

Nudge endorses libertarian paternalism: its authors propose policies that maintain freedom of choice while steering people in desirable directions. When most of us walk into the supermarket, we do not have true freedom of choice.  Our supermarket decisions cannot but be mindless because we lack critical information.   I have studied orange juice for years, so my choice as to which type to buy, or whether to buy it at all, is truly free. Not so for my choice as to which loaf of bread to buy.  Maybe I want the one that doesn't contain oil extracted from soybeans that have been genetically engineered to withstand more herbicides. Without more information, I am not free to make that decision. Contrary to what the authors might think, we do need help picking the right loaf of bread.

In their book, Thaler and Sunstein assume the role of choice architect. One of their proposals is to redesign the marketplace so that companies selling intricate products such as cell phone and insurance plans would have to make relevant information more visible and easily comparable.  Similarly we need to think about how to redesign the supermarket to make the critical yet currently invisible information about how food is produced more accessible.  Establishing a right to that information would be a start.

If you, like me, want to truly be free to choose the foods you want to buy, I suggest you pick up Nudge before your next trip to the supermarket. If we put our heads together we could use our collective wisdom to reclaim the nudge from the grip of special interests and turn it into a tool to guide our shopping carts in ways that will make us better off. Enough blindly following others and being swayed by the nudges of advertisers. I want the right to know where to find the orange juice that has not been squeezed from the hands of exploited labor.  Don't you?