it’s not hard to get good orange juice these days.

There is still some variation in quality. If you order fresh squeezed orange juice, it is sometimes not that fresh. The fancier Manhattan delis offer fresh squeezed orange juice at a high price, as much as five dollars for a plastic container of it. Sometimes it’s great; at other times you can tell it’s been on the shelf for too long.

I recall orange juice from the 1950’s. My mother would urge us to drink our orange juice at breakfast before going to school. The orange juice available then was frozen. It came in a tube. You would open it up and there would be a hunk of orange colored ice (you would squeeze the tube to make sure you got all of it). My mother would put it into a pitcher and mix it with tap water. That was our “fresh” juice. It was watery and not good. It didn’t taste anything like the real thing — in fact, it tasted horrible.

Occasionally, my mother would cut up oranges and make real orange juice, but that was rare.

Today, I had breakfast in a local restaurant. I ordered an omelet (which was delicious), toast, orange juice, and coffee.

The waitress brought the orange juice in a plastic glass that was filled with ice. Also a straw, which one does not need to drink orange juice!

I could not resist saying to her, “You know, orange juice is actually better served without ice.”

She couldn’t relate to what I was saying and had no idea as to what. She didn’t care. “We always serve it that way,” she replied.

Orange juice should not be served in with ice. It should not be warm, obviously, but it should not be chilled — ice dilutes the juice and ruins it.

A final observation, based on something a New Age type person once said to me, which seemed to make sense. If you have a craving for orange juice, your body is telling you something. Drink a lot of it right then and there. You will get a massive infusion of something – presumably Vitamin C (I am not a nutritionist or scientist and and thus am not qualified to say more) — which will do you a lot of good and may help you feel better immediately.

 

— Roger W. Smith

     July 2016