We put a tremendous amount of trust in certain brands of foods. Advertising sells. Most of us believe that the OJ we drink in the morning is giving us a good start to our day packed with Vitamin C. A few years ago a study from the American Dietetic Association showed that packaged OJ contains very little vitamin C after about 7 days. Recently a new book was published called Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice by Alissa Hamilton.
Here is an excerpt from her blog:
Q: What would consumers be surprised to discover about orange juice?
A: The leading producers of “not from concentrate” (a.k.a. pasteurized) orange juice keep their=2 0juice in million-gallon aseptic storage tanks to ensure a year-round supply. Juice stored this way has to be stripped of oxygen, a process known as de-aeration, so it doesn’t oxidize in the tanks. When the juice is stripped of oxygen, it is also stripped of flavour-providing chemicals … If you were to try the juice coming out of the tanks, it would taste like sugar water.
Juice companies therefore hire flavour and fragrance companies, the same ones that make popular perfumes and colognes, to fabricate flavour packs to add back to their product to make it taste like orange juice.
Q: What are flavour packs?
A: Flavour packs are derived from the orange essence and oils that are lost from orange juice during processing. Flavour houses break down these essence and oils into their constituent chemicals and then reassemble the chemicals into formulations that resemble nothing found in nature. Most of the juice sold in North America contains flavour packs that have especially high concentrations of ethyl butyrate, a chemical found in orange essence that the industry has discovered Americans like and associate with the flavour of a freshly squeezed orange.
Q: How is the labelling of orange juice misleading or confusing?
A: A good example is the statement that appeared at the top of Tropicana’s new and now discontinued carton: “squeezed from fresh oranges.” While meaningless – one would hope the oranges were fresh when squeezed – the statement could easily be misread as “fresh squeezed” by all but the most discerning shoppers.
Not much has changed since the early 1960s, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began to regulate orange juice in part to stop orange juice manufacturers from marketing their processed products as fresh.