Is NONE of my Food Sacred?!
Ahhhh, Orange Juice. So Pure So Natural. & So refreshing. Or so I thought until I found out the industry's dirty little secret.
I drink orange juice everyday. Let me rephrase. I DRANK orange
juice every day. In fact, I was beginning to think something was wrong
with me. I drank it A LOT. Almost addictively. It was becoming an
expensive habit. But I never gave myself a hard time over it because it
was orange juice...what could be so wrong with drinking a lot of orange
juice, right? (Besides the fact that it is pasteurized, but I
digress.....) Afterall, I wasn't buying it from concentrate, which is way
worse for you.
Well, now I know why I was drinking it so incessantly.
- There's a reason why your orange juice always tastes consistent i.e. the taste never changes.
- There's a reason why Tropicana doesn't taste like Simply Orange.
- Besides pasteurization, there's another reason why the shelf life is really long.
Hey kids, an you say 'Aseptic Storage' and 'Deaeration'? These words
of the day are brought to you by the orange juice industry itself and
should replace 'Fresh Picked' and 'Natural'.
Most, If Not All, Store Bought Orange Juice is Made the Following Way
What I thought was a product that was merely grown, picked,
squeezed, pasteurized and then put in a carton is not that simple of a
process. The step between pasteurizing and packaging is an open secret
in the Orange Juice industry and is standard industry practice.
After juicing the oranges, the juice goes to giant holding tanks and
the oxygen is removed from them. This means that it can safely sit in
there for up to a year. This also means that the liquid is now
tasteless. What gives orange juice its flavor has 100% to do with the
oxygen in it!
Flava Flave....Packets
So how come your orange juice tastes like - well - orange juice, then? Ah....the company add in flavor packets.
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. Flavor packs aren't listed as an ingredient on the label because technically they are derived from orange essence and oil. Yet those in the industry will tell you that the flavor packs, whether made for reconstituted or pasteurized orange juice, resemble nothing found in nature. The packs added to juice earmarked for the North American market tend to contain high amounts of ethyl butyrate, a chemical in the fragrance of fresh squeezed orange juice that, juice companies have discovered, Americans favor. Mexicans and Brazilians have a different palate. Flavor packs fabricated for juice geared to these markets therefore highlight different chemicals, the decanals say, or terpene compounds such as valencine.
Excellent References:
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