Squeezed What You Don't Know About Orange Juice

Close to three quarters of U.S. households buy orange juice. Its popularity crosses class, cultural, racial, and regional divides. Why do so many of us drink orange juice? How did it turn from a luxury into a staple in just a few years? More important, how is it that we don’t know the real reasons behind OJ’s popularity or understand the processes by which the juice is produced?

In this enlightening book, Alissa Hamilton explores the hidden history of orange juice. She looks at the early forces that propelled orange juice to prominence, including a surplus of oranges that plagued Florida during most of the twentieth century and the army’s need to provide vitamin C to troops overseas during World War II. She tells the stories of the FDA’s decision in the early 1960s to standardize orange juice, and the juice equivalent of the cola wars that followed between Coca-Cola (which owns Minute Maid) and Pepsi (which owns Tropicana). Of particular interest to OJ drinkers will be the revelation that most orange juice comes from Brazil, not Florida, and that even “not from concentrate” orange juice is heated, stripped of flavor, stored for up to a year, and then eflavored before it is packaged and sold. The book concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of why consumers have the right to know how their food is produced.
- Product Description, Amazon.com

This book is a thorough, though sometimes dry (insert your own pun here), account of how orange juice came to be a product marketed as quite pure but in many senses actually anything but.

It makes for an interesting case study of one corner of our incredibly industrialized food system. The author seems quite fascinated by the regulatory hearings which led especially to the current state of affairs with respect to "not-for-concentrated" orange juice; the reader feels distinctly less fascinated than the author.

One thing of interest is precisely the lack of conclusions drawn. Yes, we conclude, orange juice is quite unlike the orange in the advertisements with the straw sticking straight out of it. And, yes, the way it came to be what it is today came from complex chemical, industrial, and legal processes. But there's also not any particular reason to think that these processes are dangerous or unhealthful -- just dishonest. So what, if anything, is to be done? The author deliberately refuses to answer.
- Michael Castleman, Amazon.com

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