The following article by Tim Wilbur originally appeared in the June 12th edition of the Lawyer's Weekly:

Have you ever wondered how they make orange juice? If you are like most people, you probably thought there was nothing to wonder about. Oranges are squeezed, and then they are either put into a container (the “not from concentrate” stuff), or the water is extracted from the juice to make the frozen orange juice you buy at your local grocery store. Simple, natural, pure, right?

Wrong! Alissa Hamilton’s new book, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice, published by Yale University Press, sets out to debunk many of the common misconceptions about how “pure” orange juice really is, particularly the “not from concentrate” (NFC) kind.

Hamilton exposes the reality of the NFC process, including the use of “flavour packs,” in which the elements of oranges are altered and reconstituted, and then reintroduced into the juice after the juice has gone through an extensive pasteurization process that kills all of the original orange flavour. The orange juice industry feels that it can describe its product as 100 percent juice, since the flavour packs are derived from oranges, but Hamilton thinks this is stretching the truth. Even the most creative lawyer would likely agree. “This product obviously needs manipulation. It is not an orange with the straw through it, that is not what you are getting.”

Being a lawyer herself, Hamilton is not just interested in providing an investigative piece about the seedy underbelly of this industry. She has plenty to say about the regulation of orange juice, and food in general. She provides a lawyerly analysis of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) rules about what is considered an “ingredient” and therefore must be listed on the container. Flavour packs, given how considerably altered they are from the original orange elements, Hamilton argues, are clearly “ingredients.”

The reason they are not listed on orange juice boxes is not so much a function of the law, but of a lack of enforcement, Hamilton says. “Part of the problem is the FDA and Health Canada are regulating drugs and that is their priority and orange juice is a relatively benign product.”

But not enforcing rules because a product doesn’t do direct harm to a person is adhering to a simplistic understanding of health, Hamilton argues. She looks at the effects of the orange juice industry’s practices, including its use of mostly Brazilian, and not Floridian, oranges, on the health of the environment and agricultural workers.

And even if the FDA and Health Canada don’t care to see health in this broad manner, many consumers surely do — if only they could get truthful information about how their food is produced. “I think people do care how their food is produced, they just are so removed from it that they are making decisions based on what industry is telling them, based on marketing, rather than based on real, accurate information.”

Hamilton has recently completed her PhD in forestry and environmental studies at Yale University (Squeezed grew out of her thesis) and is currently a food and society policy fellow at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy in Minneapolis (although she lives in Toronto).

Her book is just one attempt to help inform consumers about the process, and not just the ingredients, that are part of the foods they eat. “We tend to take it for granted that (we) have a right to know what is in food, but (we) know very little about how it is produced.”

Hamilton graduated from the University of Toronto’s law school in 1998 and articled at Gowling, Strathy, and Henderson, now called Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP. She says her legal background helped her “develop policy, analyze regulations, be able to look at legislation and regulations and understand the legal framework and how we might improve it” for the environment.

She thought perhaps she would work as an environmental lawyer, but quickly decided she did not want to be just interpreting legislation — she wanted to be effecting policy change on a broader scale. “I think I am practising [law] right now, in my own way.”

If people are shocked at how complicated the production of something as simple as orange juice is, then who knows what other food production processes we take for granted. “The more we demand information, truthful information, the more hope there is that things will change.”