Earlier this week, a friend bought a 14-ounce carton of Tropicana apple juice for her two-year-old and was shocked to find this surreal statement under “Ingredients”:
Contains concentrates from Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Chile, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, China and the United States.
That an American company such as Tropicana (owned by PepsiCo) can’t figure out a way to make an apple juice with “concentrates” from U.S. apples alone illustrates exactly what’s wrong with food policy and food safety in this country. Presumably, it’s cheaper to make an apple juice from concentrates sourced from these ten countries. (Convenient that labeling laws don’t require you to say what percentages come from each country. Maybe it’s 75 percent from China and small percentages from the other nine countries…) Certainly, it’s not an attempt to jump on the locavore bandwagon the way other mainstream brands have recently done, or to guarantee food safety. (I’m not going to kvetch about the other countries on this list but China is no stickler when it comes to food safety.)
We’ve heard a lot about processed orange juice lately (there’s even a book about it, Squeezed
What gets me is that doctors and food safety experts get in a complete tizzy when people drink raw milk from a farmer they know or eat a locally-sourced hamburger medium rare, yet they don’t seem to give a damn that there are all sorts of ingredients (from ten or more different countries, no less!) in processed foods, some of which are chemicals that are added in excess of what is found in the unadulterated food. So we may be slowly poisoning a generation of kids with various chemicals but if they don’t keel over with headline-grabbing e. coli, then hey, everything is A-OK! (This brings to mind the controversy about PFOA, which is released from chemicals that are used in the slick coating of microwave popcorn bags…)
Alissa Hamilton, author of “Squeezed,” writes about how orange juice is infused with “flavor packs”—chemicals made from orange-derived substances that improve the flavor after the juice has been pasteurized, stripped of oxygen (so it can then be stored in aseptic vats for months on end) and any residual natural flavor. The ingredients list never mentions the flavor pack chemicals, because, she says, “The regulations were based on standards of identity for orange juice set in the 1960′s. Technology at that time was not sophisticated at all.”
Though industry argues that the “flavor packs” are natural (they are derived from orange “essences” and oils), they are added back in excess of what is found in fresh, pure O.J., which may explain why some people have allergic reactions to store-bought O.J. I spoke to Hamilton this afternoon, and she pointed out that much of the O.J. oils and essences that U.S. O.J. companies are using these days—not to mention the juice itself—comes from Brazil, a country that has different pesticide laws than the U.S. does.
The industry has fought listing the “flavor packs” under ingredients. “They don’t want people to know. Their argument is that it will confuse people,” says Hamilton.
So much for transparency. Let’s hope the Obama administration updates food labeling laws (or merely gets the FDA to enforce them better) soon so we can know what, exactly, we’re feeding our kids and ourselves.
Hannah Wallace
Hannah Wallace writes about food justice, integrative medicine, and travel. She is a frequent contributor to Whole Living (formerly Body + Soul), Portland Monthly, and T: Travel, and her articles and book ...
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Alissa Hamilton, apple juice, concentrates from many countries, orange juice, Squeezed
