(3 minute read)
Breakfast is one of the meals we are the most peculiar about, where we hold many of our personal rituals and enjoy some of our deeply ingrained cultural staples. It is also the meal where we are usually the least adventurous and curious, somehow in the mornings we seem to be less flexible about what we eat and drink. To most people, there are some elements that must be there, in some shape or form, period.
As a hotelier, it is also one of the meals that demands a great deal of attention. Everyone wants it, everyone expects it and mostly everyone brings their fixed ideas about what they take first thing in the morning, even when on vacation. I have had the great privilege to work in different countries and have also had the even greater pleasure to travel to many others following my insatiable curiosity. For the past 25 years, I have prepped, cooked, served, supervised, managed and created breakfasts, and one item has caught my attention everywhere I go, for work or pleasure, and it is orange juice. Not only the liquid, but the relationship most people have with it.
I totally understand coffee’s worldwide permanent position in the breakfast board, its effect on our nervous system plus its wide spectrum of flavor and possibilities, are indeed what qualifies it as a real must-have. Yet I don’t seem to understand how OJ inserted itself as an element of borderline necessity when we refer to breakfast, other than by years of excellent marketing.
I love orange juice, that golden liquid with enticing foam, with an aromatic zest from the skin, tasty and playful around the palate: sweet, sour, acidic, mild umami, so pleasant. It’s delicious and refreshing and filled with good things for your body. I understand the desire and craving for it, I get it. But so are many other fruit juices. But mostly, my point comes from having seen most people not chasing, or even caring, about having freshly squeezed juice, when all the passion one can have for it makes sense.
I have observed thousands of people open to having it in whatever way is presented, as long as it is there, regardless of its quality or nutritional value. It may be from hours or days long stored in the fridge when it has become flat in flavor, in industrial versions from a carton where it tastes like perfume, mixed from frozen concentrate for more of a paint-like experience, or fill up their glasses with a suspicious orang-y liquid from large size dispensers that have never been close to a real orange.
I was always puzzled about how pitchers of delicious, fresh, natural pineapple, watermelon or carrot juices were left untouched next to the dozens empty of pitchers of Minute Maid. I have seen people, and have had to deal with, mostly adults, react in an absolutely out of proportion manner to the absence of orange juice at a breakfast. I have witnessed rage, disbelief and utter inconvenience (tantrums if called by their name) by customers towards restaurants who would dare offer breakfast without it. Regardless of the tons of reasons which could be the cause of this absence, people don’t take well when notified that there is none, some of them not well at all. As if it were some sort of magic potion needed for survival or a required component to ensure a happy day or just the fruits of years of effective marketing.
I concluded that maybe orange juice is a comfort zone, it allows the day to start off with less uncertainty, one familiar thing that we can control, one less decision to make for today. We already know we should, must, or love to have it. Or so most of the population seems to agree on that. I see it as a universal Security Blanket.
I began to wonder, what about the idea of OJ in the morning is so hard to let go of? What are those things that at some point we seem to have come to supposedly “need”? What elements of our life do we not know how to deal with when they are absent? Also, and most importantly, what are we missing by focusing on having this one thing we already know, rather than being open to new ones? What things do we fail to see or experience as we bee-line to what we know and are familiar with? What was my orange juice?
Comfort zones, like juice, should be where we stay only when they are fresh and nurture us, which by definition means they will be temporary. When not accessible as such, don’t go for the -ish or fake version of it, better try something else. Be bold and adventurous and open to whatever else could perhaps surprise you, have a small triumph every other morning or so over your own fixations. Find out what happens if you open yourself to having something different in your morning glass.
