Jill Richardson Reviews Squeezed

by tristero

Jill Richardson of the excellent food movement blog La Vida Locavore reviews the new book, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know about Orange Juice, by Alissa Hamilton. Jill’s conclusion is fascinating, a succinct expression of the complexity of the issues swirling around mass market food production and eating today.

There’s nothing in orange juice that would kill you or make you sick or even gross you out. And that’s precisely the question the book is getting at: does it matter if we are eating (or drinking) a highly processed food and that the processing is hidden from us while the marketing makes us believe that the product is “fresh from the grove”? And what’s funny is how our perceptions have changed over time! The 1960’s era housewife remembered a time when juice came only from fresh squeezed oranges, and she was upset that a processed product was being sold under the guise of freshness.

Today? My hunch is that few people really care. It’s orange juice. It came from oranges. Do we care if the oranges aren’t from Florida, but were actually brought here from Brazil? Or that even 100% Florida orange juice includes flavor packs derived from oranges grown all over the world? Or that the OJ might contain tangerines? Or that the “quality” we perceive is really just a highly engineered flavor pack? Most of us have never known an alternative, and orange juice (even with its processing) is one of the most natural and unadulterated foods sold in a grocery store (excluding the produce section). These are questions more than they are answers, but my hunch is that if we were not as far removed from our food as we are today, we’d be healthier and better off – even if processed orange juice specifically is far and away not the biggest food problem we’ve got.

On a related food note, the movie Food, Inc. is out today. I’m incredibly busy at the moment, getting ready for a recording session, but can’t wait to see it.