Sometimes you see an ad in a busy transit hub and your eyes well up with a certain liquid. Now, it could be from the overwhelming aroma of bleach, used to mask a spill from a certain other liquid. Take your pick which one. Then again, you may just feel a connection to the words or better yet, the image on the billboard.
Ads have always been there to guide me, to teach me, to show me the way. I don’t have time to read Kelly’s blue book to choose a car or spend hours in the cereal aisle determining which rectangle box has just what I want inside. Car ads are why I hope to one day drive across a salt flat and cereal ads are why I have a sneaking sympathy for the vampiric among us. How can Dracula be such a villain when Chocula is such a hero?
These are uncomfortable questions few people dare to ask. But one ad has always stayed with me. In it, I witnessed a revolution, a window in the future. Peeking at a technology no one in the present could possibly fathom.
All these years later and orange juice remains the same. What the hell happened? Betrayal is a strong word, but it’s completely justified here. I have been betrayed by teams of citric innovators who have innovated nothing. Do they keep adding other fruit? Yes. But that wasn’t the promise. The promise was that you could stick a straw into the orange itself and start drinking. I want that. I need that. I don’t need another streaming service or a new iPhone; I want to be able to drink orange juice straight from the fruit using nothing but a straw.
It should be simple. They’ve had decades to get around to it. Instead, the focus has been on changing quantities of pulp. I dream that one day the pleasure of eating an orange is exactly the same as drinking one. Is that too much to ask?
Apparently, it is. The War on Straws has outlasted The War on Drugs and The War on Christmas, similarly opaque conflicts that have dominated news channel chyrons for years. But those battles appear over now. Because we no longer make straws that cut through in this country. They bend at the slightest pushback. Are their lonely artisans toiling away at their tool benches, blowing glass and melding metal as a sustainable straw alternative? Perhaps. But the question is this: are they doing it to change the way we drink orange juice? I think you know the answer.
To tech billionaires focused on cryptocurrency, climate change and interstellar exploration, allow me to make a modest plea. Consider the orange and how its juiced. Not only would this make amends for Tropicana’s ancient mistake, but it would also eliminate a lot of cardboard. That's good, right?
Man's original sin was clearly about fruit. That's never been disputed. Who knew it was really about juice?
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