People in other countries don’t have the food choices we Americans enjoy. It’s possible they’re jealous because we have 35 types of Oreos® and their dessert is sweet and sour cicada. (See story below on food bugs)

We, on the other hand, are a cornucopia of high fructose corn syrup based products which is a major cause of our national problem with ‘diabesity’ (New word). The only part of our bodies that are ‘in shape’ are the thumbs we use to text with.

If we got our head out of our smart phones, we’d just head down to the super market and make a sensible selection like orange juice.

In the ‘old days’ a homemaker (Your mother) would squeeze the oranges, and set a glass down on the table, you would drink the juice no questions asked. It didn’t matter if a bit of pulp found its way into the glass. It wasn’t good, it wasn’t bad. That’s just the way it was.

Orange juice marketers knew they had a winner when they named the ‘stringy stuff’ in the juice ‘pulp’. Always looking for a way to distinguish their juice from the others, they said that ‘pulp was good’. It wasn’t the ‘stringy stuff’ that should have never been in your glass; it was a marketable commodity.

Purchasing a single carton of orange juice gives us more choices than we have passwords. No pulp; With pulp; Some pulp; Most pulp and ‘Lots’ of Pulp. They package it ‘Home Squeezed’, Grower’s Style, Juicy Rewards, Calcium, Vitamin D, and Original. We’ve got ‘from concentrate’ and ’not from concentrate’.

Here’s a good one for the ‘I don’t know how to spend my money’ crowd. It’s called Trop50: You get less juice for the same price and has about half the calories (Wow!) because it’s almost 60 percent water. (Oh!)

After the oranges are squeezed, the juice is stored in giant holding tanks and, critically, the oxygen is removed from them much like a brand new member of Congress in Washington.

That essentially allows the liquid (And the Congressperson) to keep (for up to a year) without spoiling.

The choice is yours. Snack foods are the sam; hundreds of different kinds. My favorite Cheez-It® offers me 20 ways to slake my hunger.

The shelf life of a Congressperson is about the same as some junk food; 2 years. Then we throw them out.