מיץ פירות

^{‹Meetz Peirot›}
“Fruit juice”
···› from root מ-צ-ה “to squeeze”
(not to con­fuse with מ-צ-א “to find”)

What a juicy topic. It’s multi-lay­ered, not only if you let it settle.
Juice “from con­cen­trate” is boiled down to about 10% its orig­inal volume for ship­ping across the world, and some unde­clared addi­tives are used to homog­e­nize it back into some­thing resem­bling juice once re-diluted with water; some juice drinks con­tain extra sugar or fur­ther addi­tives, how some hardly con­tain any fruit at all… 

Besides that, most juice including “not from con­cen­trate” is pas­teur­ized, i.e. heated for a few sec­onds to 85° centi­grade, about 185 Fahren­heit, and then it lasts up to a year in car­tons or plastic bot­tles, sev­eral years in glass bot­tles. How can this be? How dead (micro­bi­o­log­i­cally, chem­i­cally, ener­get­i­cally) does any sub­stance have to be, so that you can keep it in a con­tainer for years without it going off? (I must admit I wonder about that even more with tinned fish…)

Is juice “healthy”? It used to… but the tides seem to have turned against it. Man­u­fac­turers often want to lead us to believe that the essence of the fruit is squeezed into each carton. Yet without the fiber and all the intact cell walls, juice con­tains high levels of sugar, typ­i­cally 10 per cent or more. That’s pretty much on par with the sugar levels in common soda drinks, the very sugar levels that every health con­scious person detests them for! Yes, with no-sugar-added “direct” fruit juice, it’s all “nat­ural” — but then, aman­itas are also “all-nat­ural”.

The ben­e­fits from eating fruit lie mainly in the nutri­ents and fiber that you get mostly from all the bits around the juice. With pome­gran­ates for example, the yellow/white stuff (called meso­carp) around the seeds and arils is very much edible and con­tains high levels of tan­nins and other nutri­ents. Yet it is most often dis­carded, as a by-product of juice production…

How much of the fruit will you be able to appre­ciate by drinking the juice? How much of the essence of the tree that those apples or oranges grew on, how much of the morning dew and evening sun that it soaked up? How much of the scenery that the tree over­looks, how much of the damp soil min­erals that the roots tap into? How much of the souls of the ani­mals that sat in its shade or nested on its branches? 

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Like­wise — how much essence of true reli­gion are you expecting to receive by reading scrip­tures only, without the cul­tural and lin­guistic con­text that they are embedded in, and that they emerged from? By reading a trans­la­tion, and only the books that some com­mit­tees decided over cen­turies were “canon”, deeming others “apoc­ryphal”? How much has been taken away? And what has been furtively added, without declaring the addi­tives? How much inter­pre­ta­tion has been added by the trans­la­tors? Just keeping in mind that the orig­inal Hebrew text of the תַּנַ״ךְ (Tanakh) had no upper- or low­er­case let­ters, no punc­tu­a­tion, some­times not even space between let­ters (at least according to Nachmanides)! 

Juice for thought… to be continued.