Whichever way you slice it - whether you drink your OJ fresh or from frozen - oranges are an ethical minefield…
Spain is the largest single source of UK citrus fruits, but 59 per cent is now imported from outside the EU - the bulk of oranges from South America. So getting our five-a-day entails serious carbon emissions. This is a new consideration for the fruit industry; in 2003 a Marks & Spencer advert boasted that its pineapple juice was rock star enough to travel from Ghana into British stores in just 48 hours, bagging the company a World Juice Innovation Award (yes, there is such a thing).

These days juice snobbery is rife, concentrate being the poor relation to freshly squeezed. In energy terms, frozen orange concentrate could be a more efficient means of getting your daily fix if it weren’t for the fact that concentrated juice is usually pasteurised (this is very energy intensive). Making a litre of fresh orange juice requires 958 litres of water for irrigation and 2 litres of tractor fuel. Then there are the pesticides. Orange production uses more than any other food crop, with obvious potential knock-on effects for both the biodiversity of the orange groves (bear in mind some 8 per cent of the world’s agricultural land is already irrevocably damaged) and the health of low-paid and unregulated fruit-picking staff. One Oxfam report found independent orange farmers in Thailand financially crippled by loans taken out to pay for insecticides, and in poor health from spraying for 44 weeks a year.

As with other commodities, orange-juice production favours the multinational over small producers: Tropicana - the label that appears in most British fridges - is owned by PepsiCo. But small independent farmers are starting to fight back through certified fairtrade orange juice, principally from Cuba (www.traidcraft.co.uk or www.fruit-passion.com, and from most supermarkets). A number of supermarkets now also sell fairtrade loose oranges and other fruits (www.fairtrade.org.uk), and these are the ones you should use in your juicer.

Use a manual juicer (such as the iconically designed Mighty OJ) and you won’t even have to worry about using extra mains electricity (and the extra CO2). But there is a downside to juicing your own fruit, particularly oranges: you throw away skins and husks that have used up energy travelling thousands of miles, so it could be argued that it’s not as efficient as buying ready-squeezed in, say, a recyclable PET bottle. But considering that 25 per cent of all fruit is thrown away rather than consumed, the issue shouldn’t necessarily be to juice or not to juice, but rather making sure you eat all the fruit you buy in the first place.