supermarket orange juice: chenicals added, stored in vats for a year

villager

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Fri May-22-09 02:18 PM
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supermarket orange juice: chenicals added, stored in vats for a year

Edited on Fri May-22-09 02:25 PM by villager

Ask an Academic: Orange Juice

Alissa Hamilton is a fellow with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and the author of �Squeezed: What You Don�t Know About Orange Juice,� which comes out this month from Yale University Press. An edited version of my conversation with her appears below.

In general, I am interested in how the food-processing industry is affecting the growing of major agricultural crops in the United States. It struck me that orange juice would be a perfect case study, because so many drink it, and the product is essentially processed oranges.

In your Introduction, you write that most orange-juice drinkers are �misinformed about what it is they are drinking.� Is it the �processed� part that most consumers are misinformed about?

That�s part of it. Most are surprised to hear, for instance, that the big brands, which market their product as �pure� and �simple,� add flavor packs to their juice to make it fresh. But people are also misinformed about the growing of juice oranges. A flight attendant once told me that he gets far more requests for orange juice on flights to Florida, because there�s still a strong association of oranges with the state. Yet most of the juice he�s serving now comes from Brazil, where there are fewer environmental regulations, and labor and land for growing oranges are cheaper.

Woah. Back up to the flavor packs. Why doesn�t orange juice taste fresh naturally, especially if it�s �not from concentrate�?

Flavor packs are fabricated from the chemicals that make up orange essence and oil. Flavor and fragrance houses, the same ones that make high end perfumes, break down orange essence and oils into their constituent chemicals and then reassemble the individual chemicals in configurations that resemble nothing found in nature. Ethyl butyrate is one of the chemicals found in high concentrations in the flavor packs added to orange juice sold in North American markets, because flavor engineers have discovered that it imparts a fragrance that Americans like, and associate with a freshly squeezed orange.

Freshly squeezed orange juice tastes fresh naturally, and some supermarkets do sell it. However, �from concentrate� and most �not from concentrate� orange juice undergo processes that strip the flavor from the juice. The largest producers of �not from concentrate� or pasteurized orange juice keep their juice in million-gallon aseptic storage tanks to ensure a year round supply. Aseptic storage involves stripping the juice of oxygen, a process known as �deaeration,� so the juice doesn�t oxidize in the �tank farms� in which the juice sits, sometimes for as long as a year.

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http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/05/ask...