it’s amazing how seeing one little news story can lead you down the rabbit hole to many…
…”shit happens”, as the bumper sticker claims.
i can’t pretend that this is terribly surprising. as a librarians kid, i tend to research more than most folks. as a result, i tend to know lots of useless shit. this will be such a bit, but i gotta purge it out of my head somewhere.
it all started with a reader’s digest bit in my news feed about “your polite habits that secretly annoy fast food workers” or something to that effect. from there, mid-bit, there was a link to an article answering the question “why does coke taste better mcdonald’s than anywhere else?” which i thought was because there’s had real sugar versus corn syrup.
nope. it’s a combination of packaging (instead of the syrup being in bags which can have an effect on the taste, it’s in steel canisters) and delivery (not only are said canisters kept refrigerated, so is the water that’s used, so it’s not relying on the ice to GET it cold, but to KEEP it cold). to that end, they also adjust their syrup/water ratio to allot for some ice melting to occur without impacting the flavor (which explains why i ordered it once with “light ice” but they gave it to me with “NO ice” and while it was still kinda cold, it was syrupy as all hell).
early in this article it explains it’s the same syrup everybody else gets, just packaging and delivery, and it’s not real sugar like the mexican coke, which linked to an additional article answering “why does mexican coke taste better than american coke?” and there the answer WAS sugar, in addition to glass bottles which don’t taint taste like aluminum cans or plastic bottles can.
so, again with the “packaging”. but in that article it made mention of the bottles of coke with the yellow caps, which i’d seen on some mexican coke bottles, so i thought it was referring to those. turns out it was referring to plastic american bottles with yellow caps, which is when they swap the HFCS out for real sugar due to passover. as this is texas and we only worship jesus here (or so i’m told) i’ve never seen this on plastic bottles, but i HAVE seen mexican coke bottles with a yellow cap, and i’m assuming that’s the same thing? it’s still labeled sugar, but maybe it’s showing it’s kosher during that time of year? who’s to know?
(last line delivered with a yiddish accent)
so that’s my coke binge – thanks for indulging me, sorry if this encourages you to rot your teeth a bit more!