Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Orange Juice Is Packed With Orange Flavors

Alissa Hamilton is promoting her book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice (Yale Agrarian Studies Series)

Boston.com has an interview: Q&A with Alissa Hamilton
IDEAS: What isn't straightforward about orange juice?

HAMILTON: It's a heavily processed product. It's heavily engineered as well. In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn't oxidize. Then it's put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it's ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.

Via BoingBoing