Dirty Dozen: Orange You Glad It's Not Tropicana

When I was a kid, my mom bought cans of frozen juice concentrate from the grocery store, and we mixed it with water in a pitcher to make our juice. Then, somewhere between junior high and high school, we, like most people I knew at the time, switched over and started getting cartons of seemingly-fancier not-from-concentrate OJ.

Why did we make the move? It's hard to say exactly, but we probably thought the not-from-concentrate juice was closer to the real thing, which is exactly what Tropicana and Minute Maid (and parent companies PepsiCo and Coca-Cola) wanted us to think.

Nothing says "all-natural" like the orange with the striped straw stabbed into it that serves as Tropicana's logo. The cartons tell us that the orange stuff inside is "100% pure & natural orange juice," but as several industry experts have noted in the past year, so-called "natural" not-from-concentrate orange juice is anything but.

Last May, Alissa Hamilton published Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice, shining some light on the OJ industry. According to Hamilton, an elaborate series of chemical procedures ensure that not-from-concentrate orange juice doesn't spoil, which is partly why it's more expensive. To store the juice, manufacturers strip it of oxygen in a process known as "deaeration," which keeps it from oxidizing. Here's an explanation from a recent blog post Hamilton wrote:

"When the juice is stripped of oxygen it is also stripped of flavor providing chemicals. Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies, the same ones that formulate perfumes for Dior and Calvin Klein, to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it taste fresh."

This seems odd, considering that many orange juice cartons say that their product is "all natural," but according to Hamilton, juice manufacturers are able to get away with it because the flavor packs are technically derived from orange essence and oil. "Those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature," she writes.

Hamilton of course isn't saying that orange juice is unsafe because it has artificial flavoring and fragrance; she's accusing them of false advertising. However, in addition to being highly-processed, there's a high carbon footprint attached to orange juice, because most of the oranges are grown in Brazil (even though the manufacturers would have us believe that they're all coming from Florida). According to the New York Times, "the equivalent of 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted to the atmosphere for each half-gallon carton of orange juice."

-Mark