Did you know.....
Oranges aren't always orange.
Oranges in warmer tropical climates never get cold enough to break down the chlorophyll in the fruit’s skin, which means they’ll be yellow or green when they’re ripe. Americans can’t deal with this, so imported oranges get treated with ripening ethylene gas to turn them orange.
Sometimes they're even dyed with Citrus Red 2 for a nice orange color.
Surprisingly, the orange was not named after its color. It was named after its fragrance. The sanskrit root name was naranga, which means fragrant. The English language adopted the word for the color we now know as orange.
Also... packaged orange juice goes through an odd process for storage. Check this out:
In her book, Squeezed: What You Don’t Know about Orange Juice, author Alissa Hamilton details the process that most commercial “natural” and “not from concentrate” orange juice goes through before it hits the grocery store. Hamilton says this type of orange juice is put in aseptic storage, which strips the juice of oxygen “so it doesn’t oxidize in the million gallon tanks in which it can be kept for upwards of a year. When the juice is stripped of oxygen, it’s also stripped of flavor-producing chemicals. Juice companies therefore hire flavor and fragrance companies…to engineer flavor packs to add back to the juice to make it fresh.” Those flavors don’t appear on the label because they’re made from orange byproducts.