I was recently contemplating the lack of automatic flushing toilets in only the places where the need to be able to not touch anything is of paramount importance. Or, at least something that had, at a bare minimum, some basis in reality. Upon failing that task rather spectacularly, I reflected upon recent developments in the proliferation of not-from-concentrate orange juice.

Growing up in our house, orange juice was not unlike a fine wine; it was to be celebrated and revered. One would dare not drink it lightly and there would certainly be no consuming of this fine nectar in mass quantities. It comes as no surprise to many that oddities of this sort were hardly odd.

In recent times, orange juice manufacturers seem to have gotten all giddy with themselves. In conjunction with the health craze that has swept the nation and changed a cause into an industry, orange juice has changed from something that both tastes good and is good for you to something that still tastes good and is good for you but is more expensive.

Not-from-concentrate is the catchphrase of the day. And, for some faux added personal value, a certain brand added the word, "Premium." Premium, indeed. I have no facts to back up this generalization, but I believe it is a general belief held by the public at large that something from a, "Mom & Pop" organization has more value than something that is produced by a mega-corporation and are thus willing to pay more for it. Thus is the case with some orange juice companies. They market their product as a local family business so that an unsuspecting and unquestioning public will pay more for their product under the guise that they're getting some sort of value from it.

Now we have things that are infused with calcium, extra vitamins, various minerals otherwise used to build things, and my personal favorite, low acid. How on earth can you justify making an orange juice without citric acid? That makes it orange water. It's like asking for tires without rubber or Olean without the anal leakage.

The thing that really gets me about all of that is that they charge anywhere from 50 cents to two dollars more per carton. I'm as much of a free market capitalist as the next American pig dog, but this isn't profit though business; this is blind rape of a society so focused on its health that it has become chief among civilized nations for its lack thereof.

So, why does any of this matter? What is the point of bringing it up when this idea is not new and will certainly be repeated in the future? I think it has something to do with the realization that Five Alive is not really orange juice but a mixture of things that, had I known at the time, I certainly would've refrained from ingesting.