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Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice (2009)

by Alissa Hamilton(Favorite Author)

3.2 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0300124716 (ISBN13: 9780300124712)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Yale University Press

review 1: Sadly, as I sit to write this review I discovered that I misplaced the many notes I took on this book. First, for a book published by an academic press I found it quite approachable considering I have little experience in nutrition, American food history, or the agricultural history of Florida. I learned a good deal about all of these topics and found the book informative and reassuring, in that I knew I wasn't drinking the OJ my brain wanted if I bought it at the supermarket, and probably not even if I purchased the oranges there to squeeze myself. However, I found the book quite disorganized and couldn't quite follow the story-arc that Hamilton attempted to write. She would mention an event in say the 1940s and follow a paragraph later with a quote from within my lifetim... moree (I was born in the last days of the 70s). Furthermore, despite a key, I often was bogged down by UUoA (Unnecessary Use of Acronyms) and wished the author found another way to distinguish various agencies and procedures key to telling the story of the Orange Juice industry of the United States. Despite my desire for a different editing of the prose, this was informative and opened a whole world I never knew about-- such as the regulation of various food staples, it makes me rethink my uninformed quips about EU & ugly fruit.
review 2: This book is written in a very academic style, and it's best for somebody who truly cares about a history of not just how orange juice evolved through the last century but about processed foods in general (with OJ as a specific example). There's nothing too sinister about OJ and it certainly won't kill you, but the marketing definitely misrepresents the final product. OJ is heated several times during processing and orange oil is removed from the juice (oil that got into the juice by squeezing the peels, I believe). The heating evaporates the "orange essence" - hundreds of chemicals that make OJ taste as heavenly as it does - and then to doctor up the final product so it's palatable, "flavor packs" are added back to the juice (that's the part I am at right now, so I don't know much about it yet). The question the book asks is: When something isnt bad enough to kill you (like OJ), do we still deserve to know how our food was produced? less

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