How green is your orange?

So, a couple of days ago The New York Times published an article called "How green is my orange?" Apparently, Tropicana picked up on the idea that living green is the biggest trend of the 21st century. They decided to hire some consultants to figure out the amount of carbon emissions released for every half-gallon of orange juice they create. I was excited to hear about Tropicana's project. I love orange juice, especially the kind that is not-from-concentrate, which just happens to also be the kind that is not-so-environmentally-friendly. This is because if you buy concentrated orange juice in a frozen canister you can save a ton of packaging waste, but if you buy not-from-concentrate, the weight of the water has to be transported over a zillion miles.

Over the course of my first 3 weeks of attempts to make positive food consumption choices, I had discovered that orange juice causes a few problems. First of all, the best tasting and probably better for your overall health orange juice is not from concentrate (Problem #1 - Transporting excess weight). Secondly, the best orange juice is made by Florida's Natural and they only use oranges from Florida (Problem #2 - Would be great if I lived in Florida and could call Florida's Natural local, but I live really, really far away from Florida). Thirdly, the organic orange juice available in Whole Foods and the Linden Hills Coop is both from concentrate, but packaged just like not-from-concentrate AND it contains oranges from all over the place (Problem #3 - Organic orange juice contains oranges flown here from South America and requires transportation of the extra water weight even though it is from-concentrate).

I am not giving up orange juice. I love it, and I am fairly certain I cannot swallow any sort of pill with any other type of liquid. My OJ is a requirement of my being.

So, back to the Tropicana case. At first Tropicana made me very sad. It turns out a half-gallon of Tropicana produces 3.75 pounds of carbon emissions. To put that in perspective, I biked 20 miles round trip per day to work all summer and I only reduced my carbon emissions by 630 pounds. But then, Tropicana made me very happy. Tropicana said, "...it turned out that the biggest single source of emissions was simply growing oranges. Citrus groves use a lot of nitrogen fertilizer, which requires natural gas to make and can turn into a potent greenhouse gas when it is spread on fields." Now, Tropicana seemed confused. At the end of the article, they stated, "Now, PepsiCo managers said they planned to work with their growers and with researchers at the University of Florida to find ways to grow oranges using less carbon. " And I said to myself, duh, have you guys not read The Omnivores Dilemma? All Tropicana needs to do to cut out practically all of their carbon emissions is grow oranges without using nitrogen fertilizer aka......

Grow them organically.

Life can be so simple.