Squeezed

Squeezed to the Last Drop: From Florida Orange Groves to the Courtroom

This piece was originally posted on the Yale Press Log.

Merriam Webster defines “natural” as “growing without human care; not cultivated,” but one organization that does not define how the word natural can be used is the Food and Drug Administration. This absence of a definition in the food industry is at the heart of Alissa Hamilton’s Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice and a series of lawsuits against orange juice giant Tropicana. Hamilton’s book is the basis for the lawsuits with the research used to write the book being used as evidence in the case. Tropicana is not the first company to find itself on the legal stand to defend itself over packaging claims, Snapple was recently taken to court over using the words “all natural” on their label when their products contained high fructose corn syrup. Snapple won summary judgment in the case in January. Other companies like 7 UP and Capri Sun have faced similar complaints and voluntarily removed all natural claims from their packages. This outcome, while not what Tropicana’s advertising agency, Juniper Park, might want to hear, would satisfy Hamilton.

In a series of recent interviews Alissa Hamilton discussed the research that went into the book and what she would like to see as a result of the lawsuit.  The fundamental idea behind Squeezed is companies are not being honest with consumers about what they include in their products. For instance, the flavor packs which provide the stored orange juice with its distinct taste is not found on the ingredient list. Hamilton argues that while the chemicals “are all derived from orange . . . they are not in the concentration that nature has provided us.” This leads, then, to the overarching question of the entire debate: what is defined as natural? The question left up to the court system is whether or not Tropicana is guilty of false advertising—should it be ruled that flavor packs are not natural—and if they should be required to include the flavor packs on their ingredient list.

While the idea of paying for something that is falsely advertised is unsettling, the idea that food and beverage companies are being dishonest is even more unsettling. Hamilton explains, in an interview with CBC in Canada, that applying the term “natural” when the products are chemically modified renders the word meaningless. Near the end of the book Hamilton emphasizes, “Unless we as consumers are provided with factual information, we cannot accurately assess what and what not to worry about. We cannot properly rank our priorities. We cannot make meaningful choices regarding the massive number of industrial products on the market.” Given the number of “natural” products that have taken up residence on grocery store shelves across the country the power of choice is growing, but it raises the question: how many of our choices are fully informed? The Tropicana lawsuit could face months to years in court with meetings, preliminary hearings, and appeals, but will it actually change the way consumers  look at food labels or what the producers put on those food labels?

For recent interviews with Alissa Hamilton and more coverage of Squeezed, you can check out the Associated Press article and CBC’s The National, Eyeopener, and Lang & O'Leary Exchange.

http://www.cbc.ca/books/2012/06/how-natural-is-your-orange-juice.html

Alissa Hamilton on ABC World News with Diane Sawyer

Watch Alissa Hamilton on a "Consumer Watch Dog" segment on ABC World News with Diane Sawyer!  (Guest hosted by George Stephanopoulos)  Read the full ABC interview online.

 

Baltimore Sun: Don't Get Squeezed When Shopping for Juice

Alissa Hamilton has done an interview with the Baltimore Sun, inspired by the Federal Trade Commission’s skepticism of the health benefits of Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice. The comparison to oranges reveals a similar product treatment over the long road from trees to juice carton, and Hamilton looks at truths for consumers behind the brand marketing.

There are plenty of important considerations to mull over: the meaning of “not from concentrate”; the value of fresh fruit compared to juice; caloric intake; and the pricing of premium juice. You can read the full story here.

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.

A response to the Florida Department of Citrus

After my interview with Evan Kleiman on KCRW's "Good Food" show, the Florida Department of Citrus (FDOC) sent Ms. Kleiman the following letter:

Dear Ms. Kleiman,

On behalf of the Florida Department of Citrus, I am writing in response to a recent interview with Alissa Hamilton on the "Good Food” show on KCRW radio. Please allow us to share further information.

Approximately 80 percent of America's orange juice is made from Florida-grown oranges.  Orange juice is processed in strict compliance with all USDA and FDA regulations. By utilizing state-of-the-art technology, we're able to provide people across the country with a consistent supply of high quality, nutritious orange juice year round.

One hundred percent orange juice is made only from oranges with no added sugars or preservatives. In fact, it's really just a few steps from the orange to orange juice: the fruit is picked at the height of ripeness; fruit that doesn't meet standards is separated out; essential oils from the orange peel are extracted and the juice is squeezed; the juice is pasteurized and chilled, blended for consistent quality and taste; and then packaged in cartons or safe-stored for packaging at a later date.

Orange juice is one of America's healthiest morning beverages. One 8-ounce glass of 100 percent orange juice delivers essential vitamins and nutrients to support good health and counts as almost 25 percent of the USDA-recommended daily fruit and vegetable servings, based on a 2,000-calorie diet.

Please visit www.OrangeJuiceFacts.com for clear, concise information about orange juice.


Thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Florida Department of Citrus

The FDOC's description of orange juice leaves out critical processing procedures, such as aseptic storage in the case of most "not from concentrate," and the chemical breakdown of orange oil and essence for reformulation by flavor engineers in the case of flavor add-back to "not from concentrate" and "from concentrate" orange juice products.

The description also masks the central role that Brazil and increasingly Mexico play in the North American market for orange juice.  The percentage of orange juice made from Florida-grown oranges in your glass depends on the product you buy.  While "not from concentrate," the most popular type of orange juice, is still made mostly from Florida-grown oranges, imports of "not from concentrate" are increasing and almost all "from concentrate" contains a significant amount of juice from oranges grown in Mexico and Brazil. In the 2007-2008 season the U.S. imported 405 500 000 gallons of orange juice, while the total volume of retail sales was 623 200 000 gallons. Hence the difficulty of finding the "100% Florida orange juice" seal on the cartons of orange juice sold in stores.   

It does not help Florida orange growers, whose interests the FDOC is supposed to represent, to ignore the threat that Brazil's juice industry is posing to Florida's orange growing economy.  Brazil surpassed Florida in the 1980s to become the world leader in orange production. It now produces almost three times as many orange as Florida. I have written from firsthand experience about how Florida grows a Valencia like no other.  I have written about studies that show that Florida's climate and unique geography produce the best juice orange in the world.  I have also written about the benefits to Florida orange growers and North American orange juice consumers of the FDOC's "fresh-squeezed citrus juicing program." A truly fresh from Florida orange juice is a product we can all stand by.

Building a more transparent food system

The following article by Alissa Hamilton originally appeared in Briarpatch Magazine:

If you are like most people, you don’t wonder much about the foods you pick up at the supermarket. You trust that they’re as straightforward as meat and potatoes, and nothing you’re going to find on the labels is likely to change that. You won’t read, for instance, that the steak you choose for the barbecue was cut from a cow that was raised in a “concentrated animal feeding operation” where it was routinely treated with antibiotics and insecticides to prevent the spread of disease in the tight quarters in which it lived alongside over 1,000 others; or that the “heart-healthy” canola oil in which you like to fry the potatoes is made from seed that has been genetically engineered to tolerate high doses of pesticides.

Health Canada recognizes that consumers must be provided with the information necessary to make healthy food choices. The Food and Drugs Act therefore requires that the ingredients and nutritional profile of packaged foods be labeled. But because healthy foods are more than the sum of their parts - they are only “healthy” if they are sustainably produced too - I think it is time we expand the legislation governing food labeling to provide consumers with information about not only what is in their food but also how it is produced.

Start with breakfast. I want to know where and how my orange juice was processed; what’s been done to the corn in my bowl of cereal; what’s in the milk I pour over it; whether the rights of the person who picked the banana I slice on top are respected; how the chickens that laid the eggs I scrambled are raised. If we knew more about how our food was produced, many of us would choose to eat differently. That’s why I’ve made it my mission to make information about how our food is produced more easily available.

The problem is that when I tell people I’m a food activist fighting for “a community right to know how food is produced,” I get a lot of blank stares. My colleagues think it is my choice of words. The “community right to know,” they tell me, is a legalistic concept that’s not part of everyday vocabulary. True, but I if I said I was trying to strengthen our right to know about the toxic pollutants in our environment, no doubt people would react differently. They would probably say, good for you, that’s important.

Which brings me to my explanation for the confusion over my job description: the concept of the community right to know is familiar, but only within a specific context. We hear about it most often in association with practices that endanger our health. This connection makes sense. It is easy to understand why we need a right to know about the existence of harmful chemicals in our immediate environment.

Only when another bout of salmonella or E. coli breaks out do we tend to think of information about how our food is produced as critical to our health and safety. Hazard prevention and the community-right-to-know principle have become so intertwined that speaking about that right in relation to something as seemingly benign as growing apples or raising cattle challenges our notion of the right as a device to protect ourselves from life-threatening activity.

I now realize that sparking a movement for the right to know how food is produced must begin by reframing the right to know as more than a safety measure. There are many reasons we should have a right to know how our food is produced and not all of them involve protecting ourselves from clear and present danger. I don’t want to eat meat that comes from animals that were treated inhumanely, or fruit and vegetables picked by farm labourers who are denied their basic rights. I am advocating for a right to know how our meat, potatoes and other food staples are produced so that we can make choices that are consistent with our convictions and that promote a more inclusive concept of health.

With a little bit of imagination, and the media’s growing attention to how our food reaches the table, hopefully soon this life pursuit will not be so hard to explain.

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?

Letter to the Editor: The F.D.A. and Engineered Food

The following letter to the editor originally appeared in the New York Times in the fall of 2008 in response to the October 4, 2008 editorial "Coming to a Plate Near You":

To the Editor:

What is especially troubling about the Food and Drug Administration’s decision to consider commercializing genetically modified animals is that consumers currently have no way of knowing which products sold in stores are, or contain, genetically modified organisms.

If the F.D.A. is going to introduce genetically engineered fish and beef into supermarkets, then transparency must extend to labeling. Regardless of whether the agency determines that the new organisms are safe, we have a right to the information that will enable us to choose whether we want to buy them.

Alissa A. Hamilton

Toronto, Oct. 5, 2008