How orange juice is made

Loyal readers know I'm a regular customer at the Produce Place (next to the Country Butcher on East State Street in Kennett), but until Monday I had never seen the automated orange juice maker in action. It was fascinating! The employee simply tossed whole oranges into the wire hopper in the top, and the rotating cupped arm of the machine "grabbed" each one and extracted the juice, which dripped down into the waiting plastic container. You could watch the whole process through the machine's window.

The machine, manufactured by Zummo, was a far cry from the juicer that F. Scott Fitzgerald described in "The Great Gatsby": “There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour, if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.”