They had names like cranberry-grape, or apple-kiwi.  The Crystal Lite was strawberry-kiwi and other exotic blends.  I started wondering why, and realized they didn’t have to make the product taste like anything, who knew what those blends would turn out?

And then it dawned on me that kids coming along today will have never tasted pure Concord grape juice, or pure Concord grapes for that matter. or strawberry juice.  They will never have tasted a fresh peach right off of a tree, or apricot.  They will know what a lot of different apples are like, but not grapes.  No Tokays, no Thompson Seedless.

Very soon fruit will simply be an artificial flavored product, the kids having been divorced from the real thing.  Someone will come out with “genuine Xandria juice bars”, having invented a flavor “Xandria” and no one will know the difference, never realize there is no Xandria, it was simply made up in the lab.

I think kids today are more and more separated from “real” experiences, juices from real fruit, fruits from real trees and not bred for easy mechanical harvesting and tough and flavorless.  Life before TV dinners, Cheerios and delivered pizzas.  I wonder how many kids under 10 have tasted a tokay or thompson seedless grape, real grape juice, a tree-ripened peach or vine ripened tomato, but know those things through artificial flavors.

No wonder those juices are sold as improbable blends, tasting like neither.  No one knows the difference.