Good morning John.

There are 3 places where you can find orange juice in the grocery store. The first one is inside of oranges. Second is inside the orange juice bottles. And do you know where the last one is? You probably do, do you? It's in the frozen food aisle.

And we have some various, let's just say, presuppositions about the quality of these juices. Getting oranges and squeezing them? That's expensive and hard work, and the best and greenest and healthiest option. Getting concentrate? That's cheap, and less healthy and worse quality and once again still involves some work. Bottled orange juice, on the other hand, is the obvious choice: healthier, better, greener.

Basically, I think orange juice from concentrate has this reputation as a sub-par product that is mostly for people who don't have enough money for the good stuff.

But I think this is wrong. And I would like to make the case for orange juice from concentrate as the best option, largely due to the fact that if you're going to drink orange juice, which you probably shouldn't, it's equally healthy, equally tasty, equally bad for the environment, and a whole lot cheaper.

Let's start with the taste test. This is the Simply Orange, which is great. It's delicious. It's orange juice.

Gotta get a Dorito for my palette cleanser. They don't teach you that in wine school. It works though.

This is from concentrate. That's very good. That's tasty. That tastes like orange juice. Orange juice is good.

[crunch from Dorito]

And here's the fresh squeezed. Compared with this, oh my god, those two taste exactly the same. Oh my god, it's delicious. Jesus. Lord.

Now I think a lot people, if you ask them, they would say that getting oranges, cutting them open, and squeezing them, is the best, and the greenest, and the healthiest option. And my friends, it is the best! But shipping oranges all around the world so that they're available year-round in Montana has a huge environmental impact.

And there also was packaging. It's just that the grocery store has already dealt with it for you. One study showed that the equivalent amount for fresh squeezed orange juice required about nine times more cardboard then the concentrated stuff.

Now let's quickly interface with the health differences, and I'll piss some people off by saying that there are none. They are all glasses full of sugar.

There is one way in which fresh squeezed orange juice is healthier than the other kinds. It is that it is so much more work, and it is so much more expensive, that you will consume less of it. Because that's the only healthy kind of orange juice: less. It's just candy water.

You've heard me give this rant before, but I won't stop doing it. But by slapping on labels like "rich in vitamin C" and "no added sugar" and "100% pure squeezed orange juice" and "not from concentrate," we get the sense that this is healthy, not just on its own, but especially in comparison with juice from concentrate.

And maybe this is a little bit reinforced by the taste because I think bottled orange juice does have a slightly more complex and less tangy flavor. And you'd think that this is because it's not from concentrate, but I don't think that's the case. I think they just want the bottled stuff to taste better, because they make more money on it. So they make it taste better.

Here's the big lie about orange juice: We think that what we are tasting is what comes out of the orange. This is demonstrably untrue.

Orange juice manufacturers want two things. One, they want their juice to taste different from a competitor's juice. It can't just taste the same. Second though, they want that different taste to taste the same as itself, from bottle to bottle, from month to month, from year to year. And that's not something you can do with oranges! So they flavor it.

Now I know what you're saying. It doesn't say flavors on the ingredients, it says 100% orange juice. Well that's because flavor chemists to magical things to orange rinds and orange pulp, and they turn the orange into a huge variety of flavor compounds so that they can carefully and consistently select a very particular flavor.

So these are flavored juices, but because they want to maintain that "100% orange juice" label, they work their butts off to create the flavor using only chemicals that you can make from oranges. And so they both come from the same sugary soup. I don't think there's any reason they have to taste different.

Now, I will say that concentrated juice is energenically expensive. It does produce a lot of carbon dioxide. And so because of that, even though concentrate is much easier to ship around, both bottled and concentrate have roughly equal carbon footprints.

But there's no doubt in anyone's mind which one has more packaging. And so with less packaging, a lower cost, and a longer shelf life, I'm a concentrate boy. Especially because I'm just gonna mix it with homemade soda water anyway.

The main thing I want people to take away from this is: Don't let people shame you into buying the more expensive option just because it's more expensive. It doesn't mean it's better. It's just orange juice. It's all bad for you!

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.