Instant juice drinks.
In the western world, the closest equivalent would be fruit squash, like Robinson's. These usually get heavy sales in the summer months when the taste of carbonate drinks has soured and alcoholic drinks have left too many hangovers. Or perhaps you are of the Wimbledon tennis crowd. Who isn't when the football season is over? But I digress.
Growing up in the Philippines, instant juice drinks were pretty much the closest we could get to having regular fruit juice. Fruit juice was pretty much expensive, so it didn't make sense to use up what meagre income one had on liquid refreshment.
Now to school kids, this meant tetra pack juice drinks, brands like Jungle Juice and the more popular Zesto. These were pretty much artificial colouring, artificial flavouring and perhaps 1% actual fruit juice! oh, and they never tasted like the advertised flavours. Orange juice was orange, pineapple was yellow, mango was yellow, guava was... yellowish-grey? Well, you get the point. most people never got the hang of the conventional method of punching a straw into these tetra packs.This was before they added the convenient punch hole. For the rest, straw inserting usually resulted in a broken straw, a hole going right through the drink container or a poked eye or finger. So, most just put the container upside down and punched a hole from the rear end.
Now, we could always tell if we had money or not during grocery shopping. We always picked up a variation of juice concentrate, usually in powdered form. If things were fine, we would buy TANG powdered juice drink. This brand was pretty respectable. They actually bothered to make proper concentrate out of fruit juice , so the resulting mixture with water was decent. Colour of juice was rich and appetising. Perfect for a hot day. Which meant most days. If things were tight, we would get the Eight o'clock brand. Cheaper and the quality could be seen even in the packaging. The trick was to just stick to the Orange juice flavour. Not that it tasted like Orange, but it was the only one that you could drink and pretty much not have a sugar overdose. Yes, there was a slight orange-y taste, but you could clearly taste the added sugar.
Now, if things were dire, you got the Ritchie's Concentrate. The closest this got to a juice drink was the colour. Even that was stretching. The Orange version of this glowed so much, I used to wonder if it was radioactive. You didn't get concentrate granules. This time you got a thick syrup that had the consistency of Calpol. Maybe Calpol would have been a better choice. You pour this thick mass into a pitcher of water, stir and hope for the best. Because this tastes nothing like juice. You still had to add sugar, just for taste. Any taste. On the bright side, using the resulting mixture and pouring into small plastic bags these made for very good outdoor Christmas decoration. Still, that unnatural glow!
So the next time you pour yourself a glass of fruit juice, be thankful it has fruit in it. Otherwise, that washing up liquid may just pack more fruit juice than the alternative.
