Flavors of America

I have some lasting first impressions of America when I took my first plane trip to LA at the age of 10. Among the memorable novelties were: Smooth and wide freeways, the smell of a garage, carpeted stairway in people’s homes, seedless green grapes, pink bubble gums, and the taste of apple juice.

Yes, apple juice, clear, sweet, and thirst quenching. I first had it on the flight to America. I had never tasted something like this. For some reason, at the time, “America” entailed something very positive and precious. So naturally the taste of the apple juice gave that impression.

Last week we hosted a potluck dinner for neighbors on the block. Paul said that with so many kids, we should perhaps get some juice boxes. I was made aware of the prevalence of juice boxes in kids’ parties. Almost every party, big or small, nice or casual, these juice boxes abound! But for some reasons I felt like rebelling, just so slightly. I was at first going to make fresh limeade to save on packaging but decided to go with large bottles of apple juice to be conservative. At least I didn’t help contribute to non-recyclable carton packaging and potential juice waste. I went to Costco and got, for the first time, these twin-pack gigantic bottles of Mott’s apple juice. Really huge bottles, but I figured we’ll have many kids.

Well, it turned out that only about 1/5 of one bottle was consumed. I ended up with so much apple juice. Reading the label made me see how much sugar is in one serving. When the kids didn’t finish their drinks, my intuition was to drink them up to avoid wasting. However, I realized that I wasn’t doing myself any good by drinking up the juice. As I was torn between drinking it up and throwing it away, I was reminded of such “precious” and yet huge, inexpensive servings of what represent a sweet (literally as well as figuratively) flavor of America.