Where's the Juice?

I remember a TV commercial from when I was a kid that had three little old ladies buying fast food. One looks in her hamburger bun and asks "Where's the beef?"

Recently, I found myself in a similar spot. Not with a hamburger patty that was smaller than expected, but with fruit 'juice' bought at the store. Now, I go to a discount grocery, as more of us are likely to find themselves doing with the current budget mess. So there isn't that great of a selection to start with. You pretty much have orange juice concentrate, gallons of refrigerated orange juice, or maybe a dozen choices, tops, for shelf-stable juices. And half of those might be cranberry blends.

Now, me, I like grapefruit juice. The only available kind anywhere in the store was actually labeled 'Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice Cocktail From Concentrate'. With, I might note, Ruby Red Grapefruit in large letters and the rest in small thin ones that could easily be lost in the background art for a hurried shopper. Ask a few of your friends what they think this means, and they'll likely have the same initial assumption that I did - it's grapefruit juice with maybe some orange or lemon other citrus added.

Wrong. So wrong.

There's no indication anywhere on the front that there's anything other than juice here. Probably from concentrate, sure, but still juice. Maybe even some sweetener, as a lot of people like their grapefruit juice, even the pink kind, with a little of the edge taken off. Tasting it, it seemed a bit strange. Not unpleasant, but for a moment I thought perhaps part of that cocktail was pineapple.

But hunt around for a bit and what did I find in tiny print on the side? The so-called juice was only 30% juice. The rest, water and high fructose corn syrup. In other words, it's mostly sugar water with less than a third of it being actual juice. And not just sugar water, but sugar water made with one of the worst sweeteners this side of chemical gunk that causes tumors in lab rats. And people wonder why fruit juice used to be good for you and is now considered 'too sugary' for kids, and why there's a rise of diabetes.

The complete list of ingredients of the fake grapefruit juice were as follows:

Filtered water - I have no real problems with this. Though I do have to note that these days, just because it's filtered doesn't mean it's safe. Not when they've found that modern water treatment methods don't remove all the traces of pharmaceutical and other drugs that end up in the water supply.

High Fructose Corn Syrup - I could write up a whole rant on this. And probably will, later on. In my opinion, this stuff needs to be banned. Food manufacturers like it cause it's cheap, covers up where food is watered down, and they can still pass it off as 'natural' despite chemical alterations that have made it anything but. I dislike it because it causes wild blood-sugar fluctuations, can eventually lead to diabetes, is worse for you than eating straight sugar cubes for a snack, and - according to some studies - may be addictive.

Ruby Red Grapefruit Juice Concentrate - Remember, juice is only 30% of this, so most is sugar water made with the above. Concentrate or not, this comprises most of the 'real food' content.

Grapefruit Juice Pulp - No problem with this. A smidge more real food in here.
Citric Acid - A food label name for a source of vitamin C. They have to add this so they can say on the label that the juice contains 100% of the US RDA for vitamin C per serving, thereby fooling people further into think it's real juice and/or healthy for them.

Natural Flavors - I'd like to see the day when the FDA makes companies put exactly which flavorings they are using on the labels. After all, they claim High Fructose Corn Syrup is a natural sweetener, so I'd hate to think what some of those flavorings might be.

Sodium Citrate - Basically a citric acid salt, more vitamin C to pump up the vitamin content.

Ascorbic Acid - Pure vitamin C, exactly what you get if you buy vitamin C tablets in the store.

Red 40 - Which is? Another thing I'd LOVE to see accountability on. They need to quit listing this junk by codes and tell us what it is on the label.

So, if one looks at the ingredients, that grapefruit juice is actually more like watered down grapefruit 'lemonade', sweetened with high fructose corn syrup, a little food coloring to make it pinker and so you can't easily tell how watered-down it is, and with some extra vitamin C. Fine, if you're the sort of person who also guzzles sodas and chemical-laden sports drinks, and doesn't care if you get diabetes when you hit 40. Not fine if you're just some poor person who's trying to eat healthy on a tight budget.

But it's just a few, right? Not if you're poor. If you have the money, you can go to Krogers or WalMart and buy 'premium' brands for two to three times the cost. My grocery doesn't even carry those brands, because they're too expensive for its customers. But when it comes to food, it sometimes seems someone somewhere has the same policy as Ebeneezer Scrooge when it comes to the poor. Feed them junk that will make them sick, and maybe they'll all die and decrease the surplus population. Water down the food enough, and the body will crave more trying to get the nutrition it needs. Add lots of high fructose corn syrup, because it's cheap and possibly addictive, and covers the watered-down taste as well as the food industry's other good buddy monosodium glutimate. The result? A chronic plague of obesity and early diabetes. Not to mention kids getting high off the high fructose corn syrup and then crashing, possibly leading to misdiagnosis as hyperactive or ADHD and being given psychiatric drugs.

So, just how many real juices were there at the discount store I shop at? Three. The most expensive juice in the store, namely the bottled orange juice in the cooler next to the milk. I can't buy that as I have to do all the shopping for the month on one day, and it would spoil. The orange juice concentrate is 100% juice, if you don't mind adding your own water. I recommend a good water purifier, though, with the tapwater problems these days. And, lastly, the shelf stable apple juice is still all juice. It's from concentrate, and there's a little vitamin C added, but that's it. No high fructose corn syrup. Not watered down. And the others? The cranberry juice was only 27% juice, the rest seem to stick to the average of 30%.

My plan for now? I'll just have to give up grapefruit. Check the labels carefully, and probably stick to the orange juice concentrate and the shelf stable apple juice.

And, like a parody of the little old ladies in that long-ago commercial, I'm still left asking... Where's the juice?