The Orange: A Tortured Journey From Orchard To Glass!

If you ever get to chance to read the book called “Squeeze,” do so because it’s an interesting take on orange juice, of all things. Now some might think that would be a tangy read, but it’s not. It talks about the popularity of our  OJ, and how it turned from a luxury into a staple in just a few years. More importantly, it also reveals the many ambushes that have been sprung on this fruit on its tortured journey from  orchard to your mouth.

Of particular interest to OJ drinkers, author Alissa Hamilton reveals that the whole Florida imagery surrounding the drink is mostly a myth and that the majority of it comes from Brazil.

She also reveals that “not from concentrate” orange juice (the supposedly superior choice to concentrate) is heated, stripped of flavour-providing chemicals which are volatile, stored for up to a year, and then reflavored (to make it taste fresh), before it’s packaged and sold.

Squeezed will give you a healthy mistrust not just of orange juice, but of corporate America’s agenda for all our food. Supermarket aisles are packed with stuff falsely labelled as orange juice — concentrate, not from concentrate, with vitamins, pasteurized, filtered. The right way to approach this would be to concede that most stores have no such thing as orange juice.

It’s not that manufacturers are forcing us to drink this nutrition devoid sugar delivery system. Real fruit has become unacceptable today. Suddenly no one wants that pulp in their OJ or lemonade, so pseudo-juice is all we can get.

Lets recap the complex definition of this product: The juice of oranges, as squeezed into a container. I’ll concede that you have to pay more for real juice products from “Whole Food Markets.” If you don’t want to shell out the cash, then you’ll be abiding with the Canadian epidemic of accepting uniform and mass-produced foods like refined orange juice as normal and satisfactory.

You could of course buy juice oranges and squeeze them yourself. Every supermarket usually has them. It’s easy and no food technology company is needed to restore the flavour and color. However, another take is that orange juice, even fresh from the fruit, is a huge sugar load. Drinking a big glass of orange juice is equivalent to eating six or eight oranges, with most of the fibre removed and all that fruit sugar available to destabilize your metabolism. Apple, or even carrot juice, that staple of the organic kitchen, is just as bad.

It’s pretty obvious that what you drink when you’re thirsty should be water. Everything else should just be a moderate way of snacking.