Squeezed

Squeezed in Men's Health: "The Worst Chemicals in Your Food"

Alissa Hamilton, author of Squeezed: What You Don't Know about Orange Juice was featured in a recent article from Men’s Health magazine titled “The Worst Chemicals in Your Food.”

While many orange juice brands tout their products as “all natural” and “freshly squeezed” the fruit beverage’s delicious flavor does not come wholly from freshly squeezed oranges from the grove. More often than not, commercial orange juice contains “flavor packs,” which are essences and oils that recreate the taste of freshly squeezed oranges. According to Hamilton, the secret to attaining that fresh orange flavor is as mysterious as the secret formula to make Coca Cola! But one ingredient is known to be present in these flavor packs: ethyl butyrate. Though it remains an FDA-approved food additive, many juice brands are fighting pending class-action lawsuits against them for having allegedly misled their customers.

Squeezed explores the obscure history of orange juice and how it became a staple item in refrigerators across the U.S. What’s more, she sheds light on how much of the orange juice-production process is remains largely unknown to consumers. This illuminating book’s case study of the orange juice industry leads one to ponder the book’s prevailing question: “Why we don’t know how our food ends up our supermarket shelf?”

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.

 

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.

Getting Fresh: An Interview with Alissa Hamilton on Orange Juice

The following article was originally published by CUESA and also appeared on CivilEats.com:

It's citrus season in California, and yet many of us are drinking orange juice out of cartons — juice from Florida oranges picked last spring, stored without oxygen and then flavored with synthetically produced "flavor packs." I recently spoke to Alissa Hamilton, author of Squeezed: What You Don’t Know about Orange Juice, about this irony, the industry behind it, and the value of fresh fruit.

Twilight Greenaway: How has the orange juice industry impacted our ideas of the seasons, when it comes to oranges and orange juice?

Alissa Hamilton: Having a 365-day supply strips away any understanding we have of seasonality. The industry first of all stores quite a bit of juice and also imports a lot from countries like Brazil. Their goal is to provide consistent tasting product, as well as consistent supply, which goes back to the 1960s when the FDA got involved in standardizing orange juice.

TG: At the center of Squeezed is the fact that orange juice makers don't have to provide information about these synthetically produced flavor packs on the carton because they're made from orange byproducts. Can you say more about this?

AH: I've been surprised about how people reacted to knowledge of the flavor packs. It really rocks people's world to learn that most orange juice is not a fresh product. We take it for granted that we have a right to know what's in food. I think people would be really upset if we were back in the 1960s, when standardized products didn’t have to list the ingredients on the label, but where we are today is not very different, in some respects.

I argue that current regulations [should be seen as] requiring companies to label the flavor packs because of the degree of manipulation involved, yet the FDA isn’t bothering with it; it’s pretty low on their priority list.

TG: Why do you think it’s perceived to be so much easier to pour a glass of orange juice than to slice an orange?

AH: People may think it's less expensive or more convenient to buy a carton of juice, but a whole orange has more vitamin C than a glass of [packaged] juice. Orange growers just don't advertise oranges — we don't have the same advertising for any whole food that we do for products. What actually surprised me when I was doing research for the book was how readily people buy into the advertising behind orange juice without much thought.

TG: Has the decision to buy whole foods over processed foods become a political one?

AH: It has come to that, yes — which is kind of crazy because it just seems to me to be common sense that you start with a whole food. For instance, part of the reason so much research went into developing good tasting orange juice was to provide soldiers over seas with vitamin C, soldiers who didn't have access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

TG: You talk about the famous "part of a balanced breakfast" line that appears in many ads, along with the image of cereal, toast, milk, and orange juice. Can you say more about that?

AH: Well, one of the reasons there has so much branding around the "balanced breakfast" is because the same big companies now often own multiple brands — for instance the quick oats might be owned by the same entity that owns the juice brand, so it's a way of bundling them together.

TG: If more people knew what actually went into the process of making packaged orange juice, do you think they’d be as likely to drink it?

AH: My intent was not to get people to stop drinking orange juice but [for them] to realize what it is they're drinking. People have a right to know how industrialized the process has become, so they can make decisions that are consistent with their values. Many who drink orange juice also have concerns about the environment and agriculture, but don't draw a connection. They might envision oranges growing in a Garden-of-Eden-like orchard in Florida, but I think if people took a trip to Bradenton, [the home of Tropicana, a product of PepsiCo.] and went to the processing plants, then yeah, they might make different choices.

TG: Do you have anything else to add?

AH: The risk is that my message will be narrowed to just orange juice, that readers will wonder: what about grapefruit juice? Or apple juice? I would hope that the message is broader than that; we really need to fight for more transparency surrounding how all of our food is produced.

"Squeezed author" examines beverage industry transparency

The current issue of Organic Product Retailer includes an interview with Alissa Hamilton about the research she conducted on the orange juice industry in support of her book, Squeezed. The issue's cover story details strategies for "braving the beverage aisle" in both traditional and specialty grocery stores, where drinks are often marketed in misleading ways to appear healthier than they truly are.

Click here to read the interview in a fully interactive digital edition of the magazine.

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.

"Squeezed" on Real Health with Dr. Steve

Alissa Hamilton was interviewed about her book on Real Health with Dr. Steve, a leading health and wellness online radio program, this week. Click here to listen to the show.

Citrus Test: How the Orange Juice Industry Is Emblematic of Commodity Agriculture

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.

WAMC's The Roundtable interview

On August 17th, Alissa Hamilton joined the discussion on WAMC's "The Roundtable" on Northeast Public Radio. Click the link below to listen to the full interview:

Download Interview with Alissa Hamilton

Orange Juice 101

The following article by Georgia Orcutt originally appeared in the Boston Parents Paper:

It’s another morning and your household is buzzing as everyone gets up, gets dressed and grabs something to eat. Out comes the cereal, the toast, and, most likely, the orange juice. Chances are you consider it one of the most important items on the breakfast menu and you even nag your kids to finish it. But do you really know anything about what’s in that carton?

Alissa Hamilton, author of Squeezed : What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice (Yale University Press, 2009) suggests we all take a closer look. Her history of the drink reveals that the juice we buy isn’t as pure as manufacturers would like us to think. In fact, even the brands such as Tropicana that promise they are pure, natural and fresh have been heated and processed, stripped of their volatile flavor-producing chemicals, held in tanks for up to a year and then engineered to taste fresh.

Hamilton’s book digs deep to unearth industry secrets. While working on and visiting farms in Central America after law school, she realized that if she wanted to work in the field of food policy, she needed a better grasp of the links between food production and consumption. She decided to focus on understanding the effects that the processed food industry is having on the growing of major crops. Orange juice seemed the perfect case study because of both its popularity and the seamless connection between the raw agricultural commodity and the processed product: orange juice is processed oranges. Hamilton shared these thoughts with us.

What surprised you the most as you researched the history of orange juice?

The degree to which consumers have bought the myths that the industry has created about orange juice. I was not surprised by the extent to which products such as "not from concentrate" orange juice, which is marketed as "pure" and "natural," are processed, but by the reactions of dismay and betrayal that I continue to receive when I describe what has to be done to juice that has a shelf life of sixty plus days and is available year round.

You say in your book that consumers act like robots when it comes to orange juice. What do you mean?

Orange juice has become a national breakfast staple. Almost two thirds of American households buy orange juice. Yet if you ask people why they do the answers sound programmed: it's healthy, it's a good source of vitamin C, it's a good way to start the day. It's true that orange juice is a good source of vitamin C for soldiers without access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice, which entered the market in the late 1940s, was invented with World War II soldiers in mind. But for those of us with a choice, a whole orange contains more vitamin C than a glass of juice. That doesn't necessarily mean don't drink orange juice. But it's important to know what you're drinking and why.

What is there about orange juice that the average consumer doesn’t know?

Florida used to produce most of the nation's orange juice. However, over the last couple of decades Florida's orange groves have been turned into condominiums as the industry has moved to Brazil, where land and labor are cheaper and where there are fewer environmental regulations. The farther juice travels and the longer it sits in storage the more heavily it is processed. Now the big orange juice companies hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that make popular perfumes and colognes, to engineer flavor packs to add back to their juice to make it taste fresh. Even most "not from concentrate," which is marketed as a fresher, higher quality product than "from concentrate," can sit in storage for a year and has flavor added to it. To call it natural is a real stretch.

If you could wave a magic wand how would you change the industry?

There needs to be more transparency surrounding the production of processed foods, orange juice included. We take it for granted that we should know what's in food but we know very little about how most food is produced. I don't expect juice companies to fill their labels with the details of how their product is processed. But it is reasonable to expect that the information they do provide be truthful and meaningful. "Nothing Added, Almost Nothing Removed" fails on the first count: for one, flavor providing essences and oils have both been added to and removed from the juice being advertised. "Squeezed from fresh oranges" fails on the latter count: one would hope the oranges were fresh when squeezed. Although meaningless, the statement could easily be misread as saying "fresh squeezed." If I could wave a magic wand such marketing tricks would no longer be the norm. Food labels would inform rather than deceive and mislead.

Many dietitians recommend eating a fresh orange and drinking a glass of water rather than buying orange juice. Are you in their camp?

I don't buy orange juice, but not as a result of writing the book. I never did. Personally, I'd rather eat an orange and drink a glass of water. In general, I prefer eating whole foods, literally: when I eat an orange I even eat the pith and save the peel for cooking. I'll leave the health advice to the dietitians. But I have nothing against orange juice, especially if it's fresh squeezed from Florida Valencias, the premium juice orange. It's Valencia season in Florida so now's the time. My dad squeezes a glass every morning. He loves it and at the same time he's supporting Florida growers. The routine seems to be working for him: he looks better than men half his age.

Georgia Orcutt is associate editor of the Boston Parents Paper.