While traveling, eating healthy, good-tasting food is harder than at home. Even when you buy something that should just be reasonably safe and normal, it can be fraught with peril.
At one gas stop, we bought some apple juice. The front label said "all juice". But reading the fine print written sideways on the rear, it turned out that it was not all apple juice. Filtered water, malic acid, ascorbic acid and of course, apple juice concentrate were the actual ingredients. This erosion and perversion of names allowed by federal regulators has spread far and wide. Standard names like "apple juice," "chocolate," "milk," and "meat" no longer mean what they once did, nor what the consumer often expects them to be. When a container says "all juice" a reasonable person, perhaps even most people, would tend to imagine juice produced from the fruits in question ("juiced"!) was what was bottled.
Additionally in the above product, the apples from which the apple juice concentrate was made were potentially from Austria, Germany, Spain, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina and America. Now, it's likely that there are growers in all of those countries who grow good quality, even organic, apples. But those are not likely the apples bought be some multi-national company looking for the cheapest apples it can find from a dozen different countries to make its juice.
This was really an industrial beverage, containing some small amounts of real apple juice from locations unknown. I don't object to such products being available. I do object to regulators allowing manufactures to cheapen, distort and abuse the language in order to trick consumers into buying something other than what they imagine. Pink slime, anyone?
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