the real thing

If you've ever been in any kind of super market, convenience store, or food mart you'll noticed a plethora of fluids filling half the shelves with promises of quenching thirst, promoting good health, or improving your life as you know it.

If you're a label reader, like I am, you'll see most of these fluids are water, high fructose corn syrup, flavorings and colors made in a laboratory.  If you hang around me long enough you'll realize one of my major peeves is the mass consumption of high fructose corn syrup or HFCS in our food supply.

HFCS is everywhere and in everything from candy to condiments and it's not only replaced sugar but is now added to things that traditionally never had sugar, like spaghetti sauce, potato chips, cheese burgers, soup mixes, fried chicken, and beef.  If you or anyone you know were to analyze something like a hair sample, you would be shocked to know we're mostly made of corn.

Cows eat and process grass for most of their lives and do a damn good job of it.  That's what they do.  Range cattle are lean and healthy but big, fat cattle weigh more and bring in more profits so for six months these healthy bovines are immobilized in pens and force fed corn to fatten them up.  Corn is toxic to the bovine digestive system so massive doses of antibiotics and bovine growth hormones are pumped into them to keep them alive just long enough for slaughter.  No cow can live longer than six months on a corn diet but it's that terminal beef that fills the meat cases at your local super market.

Then there's the diet soft drinks and healthy fluids that boast lower calories and no sugar, as if sugar is the cause of all our health problems, like the establishment science has conditioned us to believe.  So, the sugar substitute becomes aspartame, sucralose, and a handful of other laboratory, chemical concoctions designed to satisfy our appetites for sweet while lowering IQ's and raising mortality rates.

What's so bad about sugar?  Compared to HFCS and artificial sweeteners, sugar is a health food.  Consuming sugar and natural sweeteners will raise your metabolism to burn off most of those calories before your body processes it to fat while artificial sweeteners trigger the same reaction without boosting metabolism.  The result is artificial sweeteners make you fat, just like corn does to cattle.  

Every day you hear about someone diagnosed with diabetes, cancer, or liver failure and we're so used to this disease acceleration we actually think terminal disease in the middle of an average human lifespan is normal.  Like, that's the way things are supposed to be.   That's not the way it's supposed to be and decades of research points to HFCS as a leading cause of most of these health problems. 

It was twenty five years ago when Coca Cola introduced New Coke, much to the horror of every die hard Coke loyalist.  New Coke tasted like Pepsi and if Coke drinkers wanted Coke to taste like Pepsi they'd drink Pepsi.  I saw the Coke CEO at a press conference saying how he liked the new formula better than the old one, and it was at that moment I realized Coca Cola's CEO was nothing more than a corporate whore and a disgrace to all things holy.  I mean, here's the CEO of a world famous trademark and product recognized as THE symbol encapsulating what America is and the high water mark of the soft drink industry and this jackass so much as says he prefers Pepsi over Coke.  Coke was the Harley Davidson of the fluid industry.  If Pepsi had the choice they'd be Coke.  Sure as shit, if Pepsi had the Coke recipe they'd make New Pepsi and take over the market.
This Coke CEO should have been dragged off the stage and beaten bloody for having such bad taste and lack of respect for this world famous formula he was hired to serve and protect.  For that matter, the people who hired him should have been shot.

The Coke Classic that soon followed was less than a shadow of it's former self and Coke disappeared from the shelves of consumer refrigerators.  Coke is now just another crappy soft drink loaded with HFCS.  If it don't have sugar, phosphoric acid, and caffeine it aint Coke.

I often wonder what would possess a corporation like Coke to abandon the most successful, coveted, and secreted formula in the world for a slim chance of more profit and a huge chance for mega losses.  The cost of sugar compared to HFCS was one excuse but now that HFCS costs more than sugar you'd think Coke would go back to the original formula that put them on top.  Is it the corn lobby?  They're big but so was Coke.  If I owned the rights to the Bible I don't think I'd sell it to Random House, but then I'm not a corporate whore.  It seems as though there are powers behind the scene that's hell bent to make sure we all consume high doses of HFCS or some other chemical crap for reasons greater than corporate profits.

Anyway... I was checking out the fluid isles and came across something that resembled a Coke bottle and after scanning the content label I checked out a couple bottles.
I slammed half a bottle and much to my delight and surprise, this stuff was the real thing.  This was the Coke I remember from childhood and the taste jarred loose old memories of happier times and how things really do go better with Coke.  It's been so long... Twenty five years, to be exact.  It's that bite in the back of your throat when you slam a cold one followed by that wonderful, full, happy feeling in your tummy just before that Coke belch.  I drank the rest and picked up more to make a Coke stash and to give away to those who could appreciate a taste of history.

It's sad that a whole generation of Americans grew up without tasting a real Coke.  This icon of icons that the whole world knew as the best in it's class, hasn't been made in this country since 1983.  So.... I found a twenty five year old stash of vintage Coke?  No, Mexico makes it because they love it down there, as if the folks up here don't...  They want to pass on to their children the drink they loved in the pre-new coke days, as a bond with family and to connect to a happier time and a sweeter past.

Is that the reason Coke destroyed their formula?  As a deliberately planned step to condition the American populous to accept annihilation of heroes and embrace banality as a standard?  Reducing the biggest icon in a society to the level of every other icon is like replacing the lead singer with a chorus.  Innovation is stifled, freedom is diminished, liberties lost, and banal sameness and lock-step ordinary are the guiding principles of this pre-planned society taking shape before our eyes.

Yeah, I know lots of folks could care less for Coke and preferred Pepsi long before the formula change.  That's not my point and I can go on and on with this stuff for way longer than I initially intended.  Each sentence I write generates a dozen tangents and it's taking me off track.

My point is, if an unknown power has the ability, the finances, the control, and the will to cut down the biggest, most recognized, and most loved soft drink in history, it's been done with purpose and timing as a single step in a much larger plan that's been in the works for a very long time.  If they can do that, what else are they working on?  What's the goal?  Anybody?

This Coke I found, that was made in Mexico, got me on this roll and it pisses me off that the only real Coca Cola on the planet is made in a country by people who still have the freedom of choice to retain the original, true recipe while a generation of Americans are still denied as much as a taste of their own collective consciousness and see no difference between Coke and Pepsi because now they both taste like crap. 

I'm sure a lot of you reading this will think I'm ranting about being a health nut and liking coke.  It's ok.  Keep sleeping.  My point is when we encourage under achievement and suppress individual excellence we lose our identity, our self, our personal passions and become a single voice in a choir singing the same song in mindless repetition while we let duty replace our goals.  


I'll bet dollars to donuts they use real coca leaves in the process, too.