Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity (ORAC) is a laboratory assay that quantifies a food’s antioxidant capacity by measuring how well its compounds neutralise peroxyl radicals in a test tube. Developed in the 1990s, it produced the famous rankings that made blueberries, dark chocolate, and spices into “superfoods,” with marketers trumpeting ever-higher ORAC scores. The method’s scientific standing later collapsed: the USDA withdrew its ORAC database in 2012, noting that test-tube radical quenching bears little relationship to antioxidant effects in the human body, where absorption, metabolism, and distribution transform everything. ORAC values also varied wildly between laboratories. The rise and fall of ORAC is a cautionary tale about reducing nutrition to a single number, and about how readily the food industry monetises laboratory metrics that flatter its products.