Orange Juice

Orange juice from Whole Foods Market (screen shot January 8, 2021)
My preference is for half-gallon cartons of pasteurized orange juice.

Throughout the pandemic, I've been ordering Whole Foods orange juice through the above page at amazon.com.  Evidently, a lot of people are drinking orange juice this year. While sales of orange juice in the US had been declining for years, in 2020 they increased by around 10%, partly because there's a general belief that orange juice improves one's health -- which everyone is worried about. Also, more people have been eating breakfast at home, including more orange juice. (Source: Citrus Industry Magazine, January 8, 2021)

John McPhee's book Oranges tells the history of orange groves and orange juice production in Florida, as well as the history of oranges in many other times and places. In the 1960s, when McPhee wrote, the Florida orange-growing industry was completing the transition from producing and shipping fresh fruit up the east coast to producing frozen concentrate. 

The invention of frozen orange juice had caused huge change: while formerly, growers shipped boxes of fresh oranges to consumers, they now sent most of their produce to nearby factories, in which the more imaginative businessmen among them were investing their money. Instead of selling fruit whose flavor varied from season to season, from tree to tree, and even from one section of an orange to another, the factories blended multiple types of concentrated, processed, frozen juice (which tastes, says McPhee, like a blend of sugar and aspirin) with a little of the real thing. Small or large cans of juice concentrate became ubiquitous in supermarkets and home freezers.

McPhee wrote about consumers who had gladly switched over from squeezing oranges to reconstituting the syrupy stuff from the frozen cans. He discussed the sociology of orange-juice drinking: the blue-collar families of his day were still buying canned juice, while the educated consumer had embraced the frozen, and hardly anyone still squeezed their own. Neither the juice box nor the pasteurized OJ that's now most popular had yet been invented.

Researching his book, McPhee traveled the byways of rural Florida -- remember, before Disney. He observed that even the remaining roadside orange juice stands that he found were serving reconstituted juice concentrate. Further, his interviews with growers, pickers, and factory owners revealed that many orange groves were being cleared for new land use: the NASA facility at Cape Canaveral was in the process of being built on former groves. Finally, he wrote about the frenzy of effort to create new chemical orange juice surrogates. Add water to some crystals they were inventing -- they thought you would get orange juice. (I think they were actually creating Tang, but that was still in the future and they were optimistic.)

My orange juice for breakfast almost every day.
The Whole Foods orange juice carton has a new design.

When I was a child, everyone in my family had a small glass of orange juice with breakfast. My sister, brother, and I had been given "baby orange juice," that is, strained and sweetened orange juice, in our nursing bottles from something like the age of 6 months. It was a standard practice then, but is now considered very bad for babies. We survived.

My mother, like many people, switched from squeezing oranges to reconstituting frozen juice when this innovation became available in the 1950s. Some time in the 1970s, fresh-squeezed juice became a kind of a fad. Small markets or restaurants would have juice squeezers so they could make fresh juice on demand for their customers. Soon, bigger beverage bottlers began to offer fresh juice for the refrigerator aisles in the grocery store. This was much better-tasting than frozen juice. Then the orange processing industry developed pasteurized juice, which was less expensive and had a longer shelf-life but still tasted good. I continue to purchase and drink it. I guess I’ve been a very conventional consumer all my life!

Florida growers were the largest supplier of orange juice to Americans until 2017, when Brazil overtook them. Brazil currently leads the world in production of orange juice with nearly three times US production. Many Florida groves have been converted to other land use, like subdivisions of retirement homes. Florida citrus growers have struggled unsuccessfully against citrus diseases, and occasional frosts and hurricanes have destroyed orange trees over the years. Moreover, the price of Brazilian juice is lower; thus, many bottlers no longer buy American juice. The two cartons of orange juice in my refrigerator list Mexico -- the world's third-largest producer -- as the country of origin. (Statistics on global production here.)

Hesperides by
Samuel Tolkowsky. (link)

Over the years, I've read several other books about the history of citrus fruit. My favorites are McPhee's book (which I first read in 2008 and then In 2016, with my culinary history reading group, and again this week) and a very old and hard-to-find book titled Hesperides: A History of the Culture and Use of Citrus Fruits by Samuel Tolkowsky. This extensive book covers the history of entire citrus family from ancient times up until the book’s publication in 1938 -- a very interesting cultural study!

When my culinary reading group read Oranges, we particularly admired John McPhee's style and his captivating way of portraying the many people in the orange growing business in Florida. His sketches of the lives of advertising men, grove owners, fruit pickers, and many others enlivened his description of the history of citrus in Florida. Though out of date (the book has not been revised since its publication in 1966) the book brings a lot of the business of citrus to life. We wished there would be an update to tell us about modern issues like labor fairness, water consumption, climate change, and fluctuating demand from consumers of orange juice. 

I'm sharing my orange juice memories with Elizabeth and the other bloggers who like to talk about drinks once a week. This post is based on my previous writings about McPhee's book,  blogged here and here as well as current thoughts, so it is copyright © 2008-2021 by mae sander.