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Alissa Hamilton

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Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice (Yale Agrarian Studies Series) Hardcover – May 26, 2009

by Alissa Hamilton (Author)

4.4 30 ratings

Part of: Yale Agrarian Studies Series (60 books)

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Close to three quarters of U.S. households buy orange juice. Its popularity crosses class, cultural, racial, and regional divides. Why do so many of us drink orange juice? How did it turn from a luxury into a staple in just a few years? More important, how is it that we don’t know the real reasons behind OJ’s popularity or understand the processes by which the juice is produced?

In this enlightening book, Alissa Hamilton explores the hidden history of orange juice. She looks at the early forces that propelled orange juice to prominence, including a surplus of oranges that plagued Florida during most of the twentieth century and the army’s need to provide vitamin C to troops overseas during World War II. She tells the stories of the FDA’s decision in the early 1960s to standardize orange juice, and the juice equivalent of the cola wars that followed between Coca-Cola (which owns Minute Maid) and Pepsi (which owns Tropicana). Of particular interest to OJ drinkers will be the revelation that most orange juice comes from Brazil, not Florida, and that even “not from concentrate” orange juice is heated, stripped of flavor, stored for up to a year, and then reflavored before it is packaged and sold. The book concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of why consumers have the right to know how their food is produced.

Part of series

Yale Agrarian Studies Series
Print length

288 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Yale University Press
Publication date

May 26, 2009
Dimensions

6 x 1.25 x 8.75 inches
ISBN-10

0300124716
ISBN-13

978-0300124712
See all details

Steve Striffler
56
Paperback
35 offers from $1.95

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Behind the wholesome facade industry has created for orange juice is Alissa Hamilton's remarkable story of corporate power, marketing, trade and labor issues, and shrinking biodiversity. This story needs telling.”—Kelly D. Brownell, Ph.D., Yale University, co-author of Food Fight: The Inside Story of The Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It
(Kelly D. Brownell)

“You won't believe how many ambushes have been sprung on the noble orange on its tortured way from the orchard to your gullet. In this exemplary, accessible commodity study and history of regulatory failure and industrial chicanery, Hamilton lays it all out. Would that every major element in our daily diet had so able a sleuth and historian.”—James C. Scott, Yale University (James C. Scott)

"Squeezed relentlessly shatters the pleasant perceptions of morning orange juice. A strikingly original history of the Florida orange juice industry, it is deeply researched, cogently argued, and altogether eye-opening. Hamilton reveals that most of the orange juice sold in the stores is not, as advertised, either fresh or from Florida, and she advances a spirited brief for the consumer’s right to know the truth about the production of the foods they consume."—Daniel J. Kevles, Yale University

(Daniel J. Kevles)

"Full of zesty, fresh insight, concentrated scholarship, and unsweetened truths, Alissa Hamilton's Squeezed will give you a healthy mistrust not just of orange juice, but of corporate America's agenda for all our food."—Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved

(Raj Patel)

". . . reveals that orange juice, with its image as a natural Florida product . . . is often shipped from South America. . . . Consumers have a right to know what they're consuming . . . and that is at the heart of [the] story."—Devra First, Boston Globe

(Devra First Boston Globe)

About the Author

Alissa Hamilton is a Food and Society Policy Fellow with the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. She lives in Toronto.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press; 2nd Printing edition (May 26, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300124716
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300124712
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.7 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.25 x 8.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,340,332 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #461 in Agriculture Industry (Books)
- #600 in Fruit Cooking
- #1,431 in Food Science (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.4 30 ratings

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D. Knapp

Imagine learning where all of your foods come from.

Reviewed in the United States on December 25, 2020

Verified Purchase

A very worth-while read. Saved me lots of money in that now I know how misleading and outright untruthful product descriptions are. After reading this and going shopping again, it occurs to me that the majority of what my grocer sells is lies. What was the last absurdity .... a disposable credit card that can't be used to buy anything. I "chatted" with the front desk about this, but was genuinely perplexed by that statement. The manager seemed to think this was completely normal - to sell things that aren't what they're sold to be. Me - I couldn't get over it so no sale, and am still left with the "wtf" nature of what's being sold these days.

One person found this helpful

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Michael Castleman

Thorough.

Reviewed in the United States on October 15, 2009

Verified Purchase

This book is a thorough, though sometimes dry (insert your own pun here), account of how orange juice came to be a product marketed as quite pure but in many senses actually anything but.

It makes for an interesting case study of one corner of our incredibly industrialized food system. The author seems quite fascinated by the regulatory hearings which led especially to the current state of affairs with respect to "not-for-concentrated" orange juice; the reader feels distinctly less fascinated than the author.

One thing of interest is precisely the lack of conclusions drawn. Yes, we conclude, orange juice is quite unlike the orange in the advertisements with the straw sticking straight out of it. And, yes, the way it came to be what it is today came from complex chemical, industrial, and legal processes. But there's also not any particular reason to think that these processes are dangerous or unhealthful -- just dishonest. So what, if anything, is to be done? The author deliberately refuses to answer.

33 people found this helpful

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Mary

Interesting review of the Juice industry

Reviewed in the United States on May 12, 2013

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This book was interesting to read and provides a side of the juice industry that is not shown on the television ads! I enjoy reading books about all aspects of our food culture and environment. If that is not your thing you might not enjoy this book. If you believe that everyone needs to drink orange juice everyday you might be in for some surprises. As with any non-fiction book the reader should keep an open mind and perhaps be willing to do some follow up reading to get a different view.

7 people found this helpful

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Art

Informative but repetitive

Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2014

Verified Purchase

I love OJ, but never really thought about how it was made. Armed with the information in this book, I am going to be a better consumer. The one fault with this book is it is quite repetitive. Information from the 1961 Standards of Identity hearings is repeated, sometimes several times.

8 people found this helpful

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mickmouse

The politics of orange juice and the not so always sweet truth.

Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2014

Verified Purchase

Fascinating read.

One person found this helpful

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K. Jensen

It was a good read.

Reviewed in the United States on July 9, 2015

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Incredible amount of research went into the writing of this book. It was a good read.

2 people found this helpful

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Angel Varela

Repetitive

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2014

Verified Purchase

While some parts of the book are interesting and informative, the author spends an incredible amount of pages describing court proceedings on OJ identity .... I stopped reading the book.

4 people found this helpful

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Story Circle Book Reviews

Orange Juice: Fascinating, But Not so Wholesome

Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2010

Orange juice is healthy and wholesome. We drink it because it's fresh, full of Vitamin C and made from the natural fruit of orange trees. Right? Not hardly, says Alissa Hamilton in this darkly absorbing history of the Florida orange juice industry. Even if the carton says "not from concentrate," what you drink when you pour a glass of conventional, pre-squeezed orange juice is wholly industrialized, more a product of laboratory "food science" than of those sunshine-nourished orange groves Bing Crosby and Anita Bryant once pitched.

Hamilton set out to chronicle the orange juice industry's influence on the biodiversity of the sweet orange. When she and Dixi, her Jack Russell terrier-Chihuahua mix, drove to Lakeland, Florida, for four months at Florida Southern College, she hit the historian's mother-lode in the Thomas B. Mack Citrus Archives, presided over by Professor Mack himself, a nonagenarian who had studied the citrus industry for more than half a century "collecting weird and wonderful memorabilia along the way."

Documents Hamilton stumbled across in her "unmethodical" search of the archives--"the only type possible in the disarray," she comments in a wry aside--changed the direction of her research and painted a damming picture of the "wholesome" citrus industry and its "tree-fresh" product. Her discoveries--and the loss of the archives after Professor Mack died--have all the ingredients of a gripping detective story. Unfortunately, this thoroughly researched book is uneven, with long stretches that read more like a dissertation than a popular book.

It's not that Hamilton isn't a good writer. But in her enthusiasm to document the metamorphosis of the Florida orange juice industry from a fresh product to a laboratory evocation, and from individual growers hand-tending orchards of decades-old trees to industrial-scale orchards of trees "depleted" and replaced like worn-out dairy cows, the story bogs down. (The acronyms don't help: I kept stumbling over FCOJ for "frozen concentrated orange juice" and NFC OJ, "not from concentrate orange juice.")

The story in Squeezed, about an industry that became so successful in deceiving the consumer that it may have killed its own market, is an important contribution to the annals of our everyday food and how it is produced and marketed.

"I wrote this book with a modest ambition," Hamilton says in the Preface, "to make you look at your glass of pre-squeezed orange juice differently and begin to see through the opaque packages of food that surround you." She achieves that ambition and more. Although not an easy read, Squeezed is worth the effort.

by Susan J. Tweit
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

50 people found this helpful

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