I am halfway convinced that flavor wise frozen concentrated orange juice is "closer to the tree" than the "never concentrated" stuff. Nothing on fresh squeezed. But that is the price we pay to have a non-seasonal product.
As for Minute Maid, it has always tasted awful to me and it tasted worse in the 80s. The only packaged OJ I can stand is Tropicana.
Fresh squeezed is amazing.
Minute maid actually tastes better than Tropicana to me (can't stand that brand), been getting one from Spain lately at Costco (Don Simon) that's pretty good, less sweet.
THEY ARE DELICIOUS when you can find them, one of the things I miss about living in California was the brief season you could get a concord grape on the vine to eat. I have never seen them outside a bay area farmer's market, late summer if I remember correctly.
If I knew for sure when they would be available I'd certainly make a trip across the country to eat those limes.
Nothing like a fresh Florida orange, though. I used to know a secret tree in a public preserve that had the best oranges known to man.
I might drive down this winter and see if it's still there.
Of course they discontinued the angus burgers that actually used high quality ingredients compared to the McDouble / quarter pounders.
Now it’s $12 for a double quarter pounder meal and it tastes like shit. I only notice this because I just didn’t eat there much in the last 15 years. Meat quality and bun quality has clearly gotten worse. I don’t know how they keep growing sales.
You’re probably better off drinking cane sugar soda because it is more filling than HFCS soda.
Anyway orange juice is probably better still. At least it has some vitamin C and maybe trace fiber in it.
Sugar, on the other hand, has very well known and studied health risks at the concentrations we see in a lot of modern 'staples' - soda and juice included.
> However, given this study applied a heterogeneous ASB formula, it could not adequately consider the role of specific artificial sweeteners. Further research is needed to evaluate the potential effect of different artificial sweeteners and their doses on health.
So does sugar.
I have not seen a single double blind study show this in the many decades low calorie sweeteners have been consumed (in normal amounts).
What I have seen is study after study showing the harms of consuming too many carbohydrates (the amounts contained in normal consumption of juice due to quantity of sugar).
(I was wondering if climate change would be mentioned, but that doesn't seem to be critical there yet. Starting to be noticed in European grape terroir.)
> Hurricanes turned out to be a vector for spreading the little winged bug. The wind carried the psyllid all over the state, dropping it off in hundreds of thousands of acres of groves.
> It was the perfect storm. And then, of course, there were the actual perfect storms, the high-caliber hurricanes that, before climate change, didn’t come to the Ridge: Irma, Ian, Milton, massive cells, all direct hits on the groves.
IIRC, there was actually a huge marketing push because people wouldn't each the current variety ?
PS - the old one didn't go 100% extinct, and you can get small numbers of them from specialty growers. Youtube has videos of people trying them (1)
* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-we-should-br...
In the US the Interstate system helped reduce shipping and logistic costs across state lines, and so oranges became more prevalent and less 'special' post-WW2.
The article in Time Magazine puts it succinctly:
> There’s a name for this situation: monoculture, the practice of fostering just one variety of something.
In the case of bananas (and many other crops, plants, decorative trees, etc), a diversity of varieties would have minimized the spread and impact of pathogens, while providing a more diverse selection of nutritional content and flavor for consumers. But that doesn't seem to be the case for citrus trees.
I don't think that "monoculture", as it has been used or the past 50+ years, is the appropriate concept to apply to this citrus greening. Perhaps we could criticize something else - like tree density? Or perhaps monoculture is the problem, but in a much broader sense - maybe a grove with 10% citrus trees, 10% corn, 10% soybeans, 10% berries, 10% apple trees, etc...would create a biome that was hostile to the citrus greening bacteria in such a way that it couldn't thrive and spread. We have no data to support that hypothesis at this time though.
0: "What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana" https://time.com/5730790/banana-panama-disease/
Of note from the story: "...because it came from China, where oranges also came from in the first place." Technically yes but also no, what we have for the modern navel orange came from a mutation that happened in Brazil in the 1800s - 200 years after its introduction from China. The parent trees for literally the entire navel orange (aka Florida aka Sunkist orange) industry are in Riverside, CA, I see them every day driving to work. The now-deceased Queen of England used to get two boxes of oranges from those very trees every year.
I'm also curious whether the bugs would survive if you cut down every orange tree in Florida, waited a couple of years, and then planted new groves.
But when you have nothing but the perfect host for the infection, in incredibly massive proportions as far as the eye can see, a little bacteria goes a long way.
Which can be even worse :(