Diet Indecision
Once upon a time, all the diet sodas in all the land were chock full of saccharine, and all the diet soda drinkers were oblivious to any broken, skittish lab rats strung out in testing facilities with ugly malignancies of all sorts of horridness, spawned from that very same saccharine.
But the saying goes, ???Ignorance is bliss???…
Now we live in an era where just plain diet won???t do. We have demystified the chemical happiness of just about everything we eat, and this intense scrutiny makes for some interesting marketing gimmicks and desperate product offerings that want to assure an authenticity, a truer taste, a more natural formula. The only problem is, we didn???t eschew saccharine in favor of natural, earth-made products; we simply traded it in for a wider variety of more sophisticated chemicals. Which, in this competitive global marketplace, are forced to compete with all the other sophisticated chemicals. And now it???s an all-out dog-and-pony show of cola at my local supermarket.
Let???s survey the scene. Diet Coke?? now exists in no less than seven formulas: Diet, Diet Caffeine Free, Diet Coke with Splenda??, Coke Zero, Diet Cherry Vanilla Coke, Diet Coke with Lime, and Diet Coke with Lemon. Flavor selection notwithstanding, that???s a freakish number of options for sweetener alone. It used to be that if you didn???t want the sugar content of real Coke, you???d get Diet and be happy. But now you can choose from traditional diet, Splenda diet, and???Zero? What does that even mean?
I am perplexed and fascinated by the veritable smorgasbord of diet drink offerings. I often find myself standing in front of the refrigerated drinks case in a ridiculous state of indecision. With so many choices comes a certain element of pressure ??? will I make the right choice? Would Coke Zero really be better than Diet Coke with Splenda? Is there a Zero with Splenda? Or a Diet with Zero? These questions will typically keep me stymied for a minute or two, until I recognize the insanity of this internal debate, grab whichever bottle is closest, and go on my merry way. But my insatiable curiosity has a need to understand why a simple soda necessitates so many options. So I ventured on a taste-testing mission. And this sums up what I found: they???re all basically the same.
Diet Coke is the old standby. It???s slightly sharp, not too sweet, very fizzy.
But Diet Coke with Splenda is not much different. It???s the tiniest bit sweeter, and just a tad flatter. Not that you would notice either of these differences if you weren???t tasting them side by side.
And then there’s Coke Zero ??? the biggest mystery of all. There???s barely a discernible difference, except perhaps that it???s vaguely less sweet than the other two. And I mean vaguely.
So what???s the bottom line? The marketers at Coke are geniuses. They???ve managed to create multiple versions of essentially the exact same thing, slap on flashy labels of varying colors, and sell them by the millions. So the Coke Zero slurpers can feel that they???ve made a smarter choice than those silly saccharine drinkers, and those with Splenda in their cola can rest assured that their respective lab rats are healthy and cancer free.
Still, at the end of the day, they all taste the same with my burger and fries.
