IF WASTEFULNESS IS an indicator of wealth – Krusty the Clown unwinding with condor-egg omelettes – then I do not know what to say about food-industry propagandists who tout mass-produced "fresh-squeezed" orange juice by mass mailing big boxes full of packing material and empty plastic orange-juice bottles to the food press. Such a package reached me last week; going through it was like taking a refresher course in recycling. The plastic bottle (#1, PETE, high-quality stuff) goes here, the cardboard box, broken down, goes there, the nest of weird shredded stuff – to coddle the empty bottle! – goes somewhere else.

Mail does not ordinarily make me angry. Mostly it's nonsense, but modest nonsense, modestly wasteful of paper. One is annoyed, exasperated, indifferent – not offended. But a box big enough to hold a football demands attention. It won't fit in the regular mail slot and so, like oversize baggage, requires special handling. It sits proudly, importantly apart.

It is not that I missed a taste of Simply Orange ("original," "pulp free," "not from concentrate," "pasteurized," "100% pure") "Florida squeezed orange juice." I squeeze my own every morning, and I know to a moral certainty that no commercially prepared orange juice tastes anything like the juice you squeeze yourself. And it would not, frankly, enhance the credibility of so-called "fresh-squeezed" orange juice to ship it hither and yon in unrefrigerated boxes. That would look foolish, and hucksters are not generally foolish.

So it did not make me angry that the orange-juice propagandists failed to send me a sample I did not want anyway. It did – it does – make me angry that their propaganda is so grandiosely empty: a Trojan horse of promotion, with nothing inside except, for all practical purposes, refuse.

A day or two later I received another box, at least as big, and heavier. Inside: a stainless steel pail! Inside the pail: more weird shredded packing material, along with two plastic bottles (#2, HDPE), each filled with a different flavor of Raging Cow, a "naturally and artificially flavored dairy drink." Raging Cow makes no pretense of freshness; it's as processed as it gets. Is it something you're supposed to have for breakfast, perhaps on cereal? Or do you mix it with vodka? These questions have yet to be answered; likely they never will be answered, at least not by me. But at least I can use the pail in gardening and composting operations. Juiced about that.

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Oops! A reader wrote to note that Spices! is not, as I claimed a few weeks ago, the first restaurant in the city to use an exclamation point in its name. That honor belongs to the estimable Chapeau!