“ In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn’t oxidize. Then it’s put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it’s ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.

Via: kottke

An interview with Alissa Hamilton about her new book, Squeezed, reveals that that fresh orange juice you’re buying might not be so fresh or even orange-y.

I am a hard & fast declutterer, particularly in the kitchen (I don’t have a microwave, have only one pot that I also use as a skillet, use baggies rather than have an actual garbage can, etc.) but I’d be lost without my juicer. I just cannot justify paying $6 for a gallon of pasteurized juice in a plastic container when I can buy a bunch of fruits & veggies for the same price and compost all the waste or use it in soups/stocks, and get a ton of healthy great-tasting juice in the process.

Minnie, how boring to suggest that the internet is only for reading, like television!

But seriously, does anyone disagree that this is a unitasker? How many tasks does it perform? 1-Juicer. Therefore UNI-tasker.

It’s “unitasker wednesday”, not “I love my gidget and I don’t care what you say so I’m going to get all defensive wednesday”. We get it, stop putting the “nut” in health nuts.

But I’ve worked in a juice place for a couple years, and I can answer your question about how many oranges it takes to make four eight ounce servings of juice.

With an industrial juicer (I have no idea if it’s better at getting juice out than the kitchen ones), an orange usually yields between 2 and 3 ounces of juice. So it would take anywhere from 11 to 16 oranges to make 32 ounces of juice.

Seems like it might sit next to the toaster in the list of useful unitaskers. But I have to agree with the poster suggesting Craig’s Listing the first one I own to make sure I use it before sinking any $$ into it (plus second-hand might be good enough

OKAY we get it; you like your juicer!

One person’s unitasker is another’s “can’t live without it.
Stop picking on Unitasker.
They can’t ALL be perfect Gems.
Erin said tune in next week for a really hilarious one, so enough sniping.

I remember my mom having a juicer sitting and collecting dust for the most part on the kitchen counter. My blender though I use for all sorts of stuff.

I regularly add veggies to my “fruit” smoothies. Baby carrots (because I don’t want to take the time to cut them), oranges or the 100% OJ I buy for my fiance, some frozen or canned 100% pineapple or pineapple juice, and usually a tiny bit of random other stuff sometimes(yogurt, ground flax, etc.) is one of my favorites. If it ends up too thick I just add some tap water.

There’s a key difference between “I make X all the time, and a dedicated X thingy would make my life so much easier!” vs. “If I had a dedicated X thingy, I’d start to make X all the time!” It’s the second case that’s the clutter trap, and Unitasker Wednesday is targeted at that: these are things you really need to be realistic about before you commit to them.

Yes, sometimes there are really stupid unitaskers that don’t even make life easier when you *do* make X all the time. But if they’re fun to point and laugh at, then they’re probably not a real threat to uncluttering efforts. It’s the seductive “but it IS practical!” things you really have to examine, and decide where to draw the line.

And one litmus test would be: if you feel compelled to defend it in comments, it’s probably one you’re justified in having. :}

It seems to me that the problem isn’t tools, per se, but the misguided reasons people purchase them (such as notions of ease, health and beauty). Your indignation over appliances that are commonly purchased for the wrong reasons simply isn’t funny or interesting for a Wednesday schtick, since this is a pretty all-encompassing category of crap.

You might as well target SUVs next week, which are no more excessive compared to small cars than electric juicers are to manual ones. They too are often purchased because of misguided notions of “freedom” and “getting back to nature” that are rarely, but sometimes, fulfilled.

Or take my own kitchen, which is full of tools that I use all of the time, because I prefer not to buy packaged food. As a how-many-oranges-in-four-cups type, you must discard cartons or bottles after you drink your juice? Talk about unitasking! ; ) It’s all a matter of perspective.

Whereas before, the item selected was something we could ALL agree was nuts (ex. snowball former), this seems to be an “I PERSONALLY find juicers to be unnecessary” choice without much follow-up thought as to how others may use the same product in situations outside the writer’s own personal reality.

There are only so many ways one can use a Ten Can Soda Cooler…but (as proven above) juicers are in a lot of kitchens not out of neglect but out of necessity.

Full disclosure: Got a juicer for Christmas last year and it was on Ebay within 24 hours…so it wasn’t even a UNI-tasker for me!

Everyone has a different lifestyle, and thus everyone needs different equipment to go along with it. Some people backpack (tent, sleeping bag, camp stove, water purifier), some people cook gourmet foods (pasta maker, creme brulee torch, dozens of spices), some people exercise (yoga mat, weight bench, treadmill), and some do crafts (sewing machine, scrapbooking supplies, paints and easel). To those who enjoy these activities, these items may be absolutely necessary. To others, they may seem like a waste of space.

Lots of products are unitaskers, but that does not mean that they aren’t necessary or useful to the pursuit of a particular activity. When it comes right down to it, most of the products we use are single-use items. Who really needs a couch anyway? We could all just sit on the floor!

I liked the Unitasker feature when it was about over-the-top products that everyone could laugh about (battery powered spaghetti-winding fork, anyone?). Perhaps it should return to its roots instead of becoming a venue for criticizing others’ possessions and lifestyle choices.