There are days when I really like the news. Friday morning, a lovely piece from the Press Trust of India crossed the screen. The government in the northern India state of Punjab has officially banned Coke and Pepsi from all the schools, universities, medical and technical colleges, as well as government offices. The reason? The manufacturers will not disclose what is in the products. A privately-funded group in India, the Centre for Science and Environment said that the two products contained high levels of pesticides, as well as caffeine, aspartame and phosphoric acid. Coke and Pepsi refuse to put warnings on their products, or disclose what percentages of the bad stuff exist in their fluids, so the Indian Supreme Court has given the soda big boys two months to give it up.
The products, in all their various incarnations, are; water, sweetener, carbonation and flavorings. The bulk of soda is water, hopefully purified and not from a mud puddle behind the warehouse. Sweeteners can be anything from granulated white sugar to aspartame. Carbonation is Carbon Dioxide, under pressure, perfused through the fluid. Flavourings are where the secrets sleep, which is why Pepsi and Coke are very unhappy about having to disclose their ingredients.
In the earliest days of soft drink making, it was pharmacists who came up with the original recipes, as they had access to the weird plant matter and tinctures to develop flavourings to cover the taste of medicine. Root beer, that foaming glass of childhood happiness, is quite vile sounding if you list the ingredients. According to wikipedia, the ingredients can include: “a combination of vanilla, cherry tree bark, licorice root, sarsaparilla root, sassafras root bark, nutmeg, anise, and molasses. Other ingredients may include allspice, birch bark, coriander, juniper, ginger, wintergreen, hops, burdock root, dandelion root, spikenard, pipsissewa, guaiacum, yellow dock, honey, clover, cinnamon, prickly ash bark, and yucca.”
This means, chop up as many strange roots and tree parts as you can get your hands on. Soak in water and alcohol and call it a flavour base. Add gallons of water, a bucket of sugar and carbonation. Bottle, sell to minors. Pepsi was sold as a “peptic” tonic, peptic meaning to treat stomach upset and make you burp to reduce indigestion. Cocoa-Cola was a ‘refreshing’ tonic with gobs of flavouring and sugar to cover the tonic medicines of laudanum and a huge whack of caffeine. Laudanum is a tincture of opium from cocoa leaves.
The medicinal ingredients and claims are, of course, in the dark history of the soft drink industry. The flavourings are now mostly synthetic reproductions of their original herbal cousins with the occasional soda company reverting to naturally derived flavour. Marketing creates the image and people line up to open a bottle or can of image, not a flavour profile. Jones Soda Company, for example, has the rebel act down pat, with customers providing the label art work. Flavours include Cream Soda, Green Apple and Watermelon. Pepsi and Coke have almost limitless combinations and permutations of their mainstream cola products. Offshore, companies produce soft drinks in flavours that make sense for their local tastes, including betel nut and hibiscus drinks. I suspect that someone has tried to market a hot dog or fried chicken flavoured soda.
Which brings us back to the original story from the Press Trust of India: Do we really need to know the full list of ingredients in Pepsi and Coke? Will the Earth be irredeemably harmed knowing that Secret Ingredient 7X in Coke is actually tincture of basset hound nipples? Soda is fizzy water and sugar with a flavour, end of story.
RoadDave 