I drink a great deal of orange juice. How can I be sure that what I am drinking is the juice of an orange and not food coloring, sugar, thickener and water?
Ummm, read the ingredients on the label or squeeze your own.
Just read the label on the box before you purchase it.
I just looked in the refrigerator, and my carton of orange juice (which happens to be Tropicana) says “100% pure squeezed orange juice”. Farther down the carton is another label that says “no water or preservatives added”.
If you don’t believe the writing on the carton I suppose that you could purchase your orange juice in its original container…
If they could make fake orange juice from those components you mentioned and you couldn’t taste the different, that would be the greatest invention of the 21st century. Most fake orange juices are instantly detectable. Very high standards we have nowadays.
You can’t. You just have to trust that govt. food inspectors are doing their job to prevent such fraud.
Or, take a glass of it to your local university and run it through the mass spectrometer. This is how the French assure that their juices (and esp. wine) are pure.
Curse those French and their everpresent Mass Spectrometers!!! If I had a dollar for every time the waiter ran out with my wife to fire it through the mass spectrometer, well, I just don’t know what I would do.
Hmm, maybe the waiter and your wife are just telling you that they’re out running the wine through a mass spectrometer…
As Cecil mentions in this column, Florida, where most US orange juice comes from, is pretty strict on labeling and content standards.
Arjuna34
Why is it then that orange juice such as Tropicana tastes nothing like the REAL orange juice you can buy in food courts which cost nearly two bucks a cup (almost the price of a 2L carton of OJ)?
It could be that the $2 / cup variety is fresher. It could be that it’s concentrated (Tropicana isn’t). It could be that your brain is telling you that it must be better because it costs more. 
It could also be that the food court folks add flavoring ingredients to their OJ. The Tropicana folks can’t or they’d have to list it on their label.
Depends on how the food court makes it. A lot of the OJ sold is concentrated. As someone else mentioned, Tropicana is not. But to a large degree, what makes a brand is consistency. Thus, I would say Tropicana is very, very precise in its ingredients. Sure, it’s 100% pure OJ, but from what mixture of orange varieties? Also, I seem to think that commericial orange juice is pasteurized. That really changes the taste.
If you make your own fresh squeezed OJ (as I suspect is what you mean the food courts do), you get juice from a fresh orange; it’s a bit more pulpy; it’s from whatever mix of oranges you have available (and at whatever age), and most of all, it’s not pasteurized.
Pasteurization makes a big difference in taste.
To steal the thread, I live in a huge apple state, which means lots of delicious apple cider! Up until a couple years ago, we could buy fresh, non-pasteurized apple cider directly from the mill (or in the supermarkets too). BUT, some silly e. coli alarmists got a law passed dictating that only pasteurized cider be available. IT’S NOT THE SAME! May as well require prescriptions for aspirin…
A quick observation from a diehard Tropicana consumer. The flavors are subtlely different depending on whether you buy in Seattle, WA or NYC, NY. Hard to put the differences into words, although, generally I prefer the West Coast Mix. I also noticed some seasonal variation in the NYC juice at least (not enough year-round sampling of the Seattle stock to make a judgement), with the best flavors coming in the winter months. I assume that the variations are due to different oranges being processed in different regions as well as at different times of the year.
I’ll second the statement regarding the different varieties of oranges.
Daddy lives in Florida and sends me oranges (Daddy loves me, but I also send him apples in the fall). Sometimes, he sends me commercial oranges available through mail order. Sometimes, he sends me some off his tree. The ones of his tree are worlds different/better than any others (I plan on seeing Daddy for his 80’th birthday the weekend of 2/1, hoping to partake of some while I’m there).
At any rate, commercially prepared orange juices will have significantly different flavors depending on the variety and combinations of varities of oranges used. Well, significant to the discriminate taster (and/or if you drink one right after the other). It’s the same with apple ciders - and especially the apples themselves (so sayeth the woman from MI, home of the best apples around, - take that Washington).
So, naturally, the conclusion is:
“I’m talking oranges and apples”