Trouble in Paradise

This blog has been rather light and fluffy up to this point, but I think it’s time to address a serious topic. Brazil has a problem—a crisis, really—that has been kept in the dark for too long. I believe it’s my duty to blow the lid off this scandal.

The orange juice here is completely unacceptable.

For a country blessed with such an abundance of oranges (check the origin of your OJ sometime; chances are it’s either Florida or Brazil), you’d think the juice here would be first-rate. But in fact, it tastes like orange-flavored water. And to rub salt in the wound, it costs six dollars a gallon.

Scoff if you will, but this situation has had serious ramifications. A lack of good OJ prompted me to explore other juice options. Orange-peach, orange-mango, orange-acerola (whatever that is)—all of these bastardizations fell woefully short of the mark. So I made a tough decision. If I couldn’t have good orange juice, I wouldn’t drink any orange juice at all. Then, inevitably, I came down with a nasty cold. I haven’t had a cold in years—and I’m pretty sure it’s because I made a habit of ingesting 300% of my recommended daily allowance of vitamin C.

All juiced up

Our roommate’s mom bought her a juicer a couple weeks ago. So Kim came to my rescue and made me a glass of freshly squeezed OJ. It’s kind of a pain to use the juicer, since it requires a lot of cleanup, but I got my jolt of vitamin C and recovered from my cold in no time. But when I regained my sense of taste, I noticed something odd: even the freshly squeezed orange juice didn’t taste quite right. Actually, it might have something to do with the oranges we used. You see, when we go to the grocery store, we have three options. We can buy oranges that are orange (as you might expect), but we can also buy oranges that are green and oranges that are yellow. The orange oranges are decent, but they’re not sour enough. The green oranges are kind of bitter. The yellow oranges are somewhere in between.

So now the hard work begins. We shall not rest until we concoct the perfect mixture of orange, green, and yellow oranges.