Boing Boing’s David Pescovitz points to Alissa Hamilton, author of Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice for some secrets of the Orange Juice Industry:
Think about it; how could it be truly fresh year-round, when oranges are a seasonal product? Sure, it may be “not from concentrate,” but raw juice is often heated, stripped of its volatile compounds and flavor-rich oils, and stored for as long as a year before it reaches the consumer. Something called “the flavor pack” is used to return most of the “natural” aroma and taste to the product, Hamilton explains:
The flavor is sourced from all parts of oranges everywhere…Typically, the orange oils and essences that juice concentrators collect during evaporation are sold to flavor manufacturers, who then reconfigure these by-products…into ‘flavor packs’ for reintroduction into orange juice.Often, those by-products come from other countries and may contain unknown pesticide residues, but the producers don’t have to disclose that.
President Obama is doing his part, quietly, to raise awareness around food. In Iowa, he made an unscheduled visit to an organic farm and local restaurant.
As if we don’t already have enough to fret about, Foreign Policy looks at an essential, if underappreciated component of our daily lives, and a key link in the global food chain. It’s running out:
From Kansas to China’s Sichuan province, farmers treat their fields with phosphorus-rich fertilizer to increase the yield of their crops. What happens next, however, receives relatively little attention. Large amounts of this resource are lost from farm fields, through soil erosion and runoff, and down swirling toilets, through our urine and feces. Although seemingly mundane, this process cannot continue indefinitely. Our dwindling supply of phosphorus, a primary component underlying the growth of global agricultural production, threatens to disrupt food security across the planet during the coming century. This is the gravest natural resource shortage you’ve never heard of.
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