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Remember when the huge juice craze hit the U.S.? Everywhere you went there was some fancy juice bar where they threw whole fruit into a galactic blender and served it up in martini glasses. These places also introduced shots of real, pulverized, GRASS…and not the marijuana kind, but the stuff you find in parks kind. Wheatgrass, that’s what it was called. We’d slug down a shot and marvel about how great it was for you. You could also buy custom made smoothies that were spiked with echincea and other goodies. I remember staggering out of bed and to the local IntaJuice for a Vitamin C Smoothie. I doubt it really worked, (does any of that stuff really work?), but I was convinced at the time that pulverized bananas would somehow cure me.
This was all around the same time that PowerBars were introduced. Folks couldn’t slow down for lunch so a PowerBar replaced what could have been a promising meal. I remember being at Bumpershoot in 1996 and raiding the PowerBar tent every few hours for free samples. I watched a myriad of bands all hopped up on fake nutrients. Needless to say they did not give away free samples the following year.
I think Atkins destroyed the juice industry. (And probably the Powerbar industry as well). Low-Carb People are not friendly towards fruit, especially juice, and a 15.2 oz bottle of Odwalla contains 33g of Carbs. This means that Odwalla is put on sale a lot…and I lOVE Odwalla. I could never afford it, but now my local store constantly sells Odwalla at the reduced price of 2 bucks a bottle. Even though the Vitamin C Monster tastes like a chewed up vitamin I still suck it down. I’m sure there are hidden hazards, maybe the fruit is injected with pesticides or the claims written on the bottle are false, but I want to BELIEVE. Perhaps the diet crazes will turn around and go back to liquid diets, fat free food, and the praises of grapefruit….until than I’m drinking Odwalla on sale.