The staid carton of orange juice has long sat next to tea and coffee at the breakfast table. It’s bright, but somewhat boring, and bears the dubious halo of being something good for you. Few of us give it much thought, other than to recall its oft-trumpeted vitamin C content. But processed orange juice as a daily drink, you might be surprised to learn, is a relatively recent arrival. Its present status as a global phenomenon is the creation of 20th-Century marketers, dealing with a lot of oranges and nowhere to dump them. In the early 1900s, Florida and California oranges vied for the attention of American shoppers. The fruits were shipped all over and eaten fresh or juiced in the home, producing a delicious honey-color elixir. California relied on the navel orange and the Valencia orange, the latter was the best for juicing. Florida, however, grew four varieties, and all of these were decent juice oranges. That meant that when, in 1909, the growers met to deal with a burgeoning problem – a glut of oranges, too many for the market to bear – juicing them, rather than curbing their production, was considered a feasible solution. Orange juice made commercially was only available in a can. The flavor of canned orange juice was nothing like fresh, and the appetite for it reflected that. Only 0.01 pounds, or about a teaspoon, of canned orange juice was consumed per person in the US in 1930, writes historian Alissa Hamilton in her book Squeezed, compared to nearly 19lbs 8.6 kg of oranges per person in the same year. Juice was still canned at this point in its evolution and far from popular. But the government, especially the Florida Department of Citrus, was willing to invest in experimentation. The US Army’s World War Two search for a form of citrus that soldiers would not surreptitiously jettison from their rations led to a research program into palatable orange juice. Trying to condense orange juice like milk led to memorably bad results. "High temperatures burned off its shine and produced a viscous and brownish mixture that lacked fresh flavor [sic]," writes Hamilton, the historian. But evaporating some water under pressure, mixing a portion of fresh juice back into the concentrate, then freezing it, was more successful. The fresh juice rescued the funky concentrate. It produced something worth drinking, if still a far cry from the undiluted fresh version.
The innovation arrived as Florida growers were dealing with cyclical, massive overproduction. The promise of a new way to make juice that could be kept frozen, then reconstituted in people's homes, prompted them into even more production, however. They ramped up tree planting in the 1940s. The oranges went to frozen concentrate and eventually, to chilled juice, an industry term for the refrigerated product. If juice could be kept in stasis, held in waiting for a consumer's glass, then the only problem was ramping up demand as much as possible.
It did not matter that this juice was different from a glass of truly fresh-squeezed. When John Mcghee checked into a Florida hotel for a reporting trip more than 50 years ago, he discovered that even in the heartland of oranges, fresh juice was a dim memory.
"Next door was a restaurant, with orange trees, full of fruit, spreading over its parking lot, he wrote in his book Oranges. "I went in for dinner, and, since I would be staying for some time and this was the only restaurant in the neighborhood, I checked on the possibility of fresh juice for breakfast. There were never any requests for fresh orange juice, the waitress explained, apparently unmindful of the one that had just been made. "Fresh is either too sour or too watery or too something," she said.
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