It was a whim, fortified by the challenge of dumping some tonnage; I reluctantly stuck my Wendy’s cup under the Diet Coke spigot for the first time. I have never even been interested in diet drinks. In the old days they caused cancer, which I may get sooner or later, but I don’t want to get it from diet soda. The first diet drink I tried was Tab. It was awful. Then the onslaught of diet drinks. All awful; and they caused cancer to boot.
I remember Ferree giving me the low-down on cyclamates, the magic sweetening carcinogenic ingredient back in ‘77. He said something like the way we taste requires molecules to go up or down in the papilla of the tongue. The cyclamates go way down and are not washed away by saliva. That’s the lingering after-taste and since it isn’t easily washed away, it’s sitting there causes rot, leading to cancer.
Then they went to saccharine. Same shit, new name. They said it’d only cause cancer if you drank a gallon a day for ten years. Child’s play, I drink way more than that, so I stick with regular pop when I drink pop. Then Sucralose (splenda) in diet drinks and now Aspartame (nutrasweet) in the Coke Zero products. I’m sure they’ll eventually tell us these cause some terminal disease too, but now the crap they put in regular Cokes is horrible too.
When I was a kid sodas were sweetened with sugar (sucrose). Then around 1985 they were sweetened with fructose (high fructose corn syrup), which is cheaper to make and transport. Some people say it causes problems too, it makes you twice as fat as sugar does and is made by modifying enzymes that somehow screw with you and is generally uncool. Pepsi has gone back to its sugar formula, Coke that is bottled in Mexico is sugar based too.
Anyway, my first diet coke was from the fountain at Wendy’s. It was tolerable. I’m pretty much restricted to fountain drinks anymore, cans and bottles just taste weird these days. So the next day I drank diet again. Then I tried diet at Jack-in-the-Box by my house, awful. Jack-in-the-Box in Brea was fine. I haven’t found any taste consistency yet, but I feel strangely hungry these days. I’m sure part of the way diet drinks work is by the taste, you just want to drink less.
It doesn’t look as good either. Regular Coke has clear sparkling bubbles that generously fizz at the top of your cup. Diet coke has dull brown foam that fortunately dies quickly from view. When it’s splashing down into your cup it has kind of a dirty look to it, like beach-break waves at Newport.
