Coming from a family with a purely agricultural background the article, “Jamba Dices Competing Blenders” (Daily Nexus, Feb. 28, 2006) naturally caught my interest. What caught my interest, however, was the lack of agricultural understanding demonstrated by the writer. I can only assume that the person who wrote this article is a person who grew up in an urban setting as opposed to rural.

People who grow up in the city or suburb usually get things such as produce from a grocery store. Grocery stores will usually always have all the types of “fresh” produce that a consumer would demand.

However, all produce has its growing season. Let’s take my family’s crop – peaches – for example. Peaches are harvested starting 2-3 weeks into the summer season all the way until the end of summer. Peaches have a shelf life of approximately one week if they are picked at a fair ripeness, and can potentially last for six weeks in cold storage. The significance of this is that peaches are only in season and supplied at a high quality in the state of California for a few months. This means the rest of the year the grocery stores and businesses such as Jamba Juice have to find fruit from other sources such as out of the country. Produce that is grown out of the country is picked at minimal ripeness and later stored in cold storage for a long period of time and exported to the United States where it is consumed by Americans by means of grocery stores and places such as Jamba Juice.

So, in all reality, the quality of the product being bought at the store and at Jamba is a product of poor relative quality given the season purchased. Blenders is a business that doesn’t operate on the large scale that Jamba does and, in turn, most likely obtains fresh fruit and produce grown locally and seasonally. So, through my long reasoning, we can conclude that if you want fresh fucking orange juice it should be orange season. Also, large-scale vendors of produce cannot possibly carry a quality product if it is not in season at the time. Finally, people that don’t have a clue about the subject they are bitching about should never write about it. And both companies are a rip-off anyway.

Kyle Dewsnup is a sophomore business economics major.