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re humans more alike or more different? I try my best never to think about it, partly because the implications are far too terrifying, and partly because the evidence is too abstract and boring. The fuck can I do with the grand observation that all around the world, at any given time, people of all walks of life are feeling pleasure and pain? It’s easier to connect with a billion people by eating Big Macs than it is to conceptualize our common reckoning with death. Just see if you don't feel moved in some direction as you read this quote from Andy Warhol about Coca-Cola:

You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.If you’re looking for evidence of mass commonality, it doesn’t come cheaper or more convenient than Coke. It’s consumed around 1.9 billion times per day, and distributed everywhere except North Korea and Cuba (for now). Through Coke we all have something in common — Liz Taylor knows it, the president knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it. I, on the other hand, can only trust and speculate. I’ve never had a Coke in my life.

How Something Like This Could Possibly Happen

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ake no mistake — it’s not like I was raised in Bob’s Red Mill or anything. Our house had Fruit by the Foot and purple Heinz EZ Squirt and all of the other modernist foods of middle-class people in the nineties. There was Coke in the fridge and I could drink it if I wanted — I just never did. It was a preschool aversion like unbreaded chicken, or those small green flecks on pizza and in pasta. To readers who’ve grown sense-numb from a lifetime of cola, I remind them that Coke, divorced from the shades of branding and nostalgia, just looks like wastewater from a fracking site.

(Bear with me. This isn’t some smug tirade against a widely beloved populist icon. Nor is it about to become some semi-precious ode to the important myth status of mass consumer goods. I don’t have a horse in this race. I’m just setting up how I lived twenty-four years without ever trying Coke, or any cola for that matter.)

Over time, mere aversion gelled to a stance. By mid-grade school, I was not drinking Coke in the same sanctimonious way as the kid who fake coughs at smokers outside the supermarket. I was that kid too. I protested school Christmas parties on the grounds of church and state, rallied against Pokémon trading on the playground, and voiced my objections to reality TV in a wan and sniveling tone trickled down two decades from Kurt Cobain’s (already wan and sniveling) CORPORATE MAGAZINES STILL SUCK . I grew to hate not only Coke itself, but its co-branded inclusion in rib marinades at chain restaurants, and the deployment of its logo on fake-vintage tin signs in the clearance section of Ross Dress for Less.

If you’re looking for evidence of mass commonality, it doesn’t come cheaper or more convenient than Coke. It’s consumed around 1.9 billion times per day.

By college, I’d evolve to hate both Coke and its haters. "Capitalism hegemony unpack parse deconstruct Grammatology," I’d yawn. I didn’t even have a television. I experimented heavily — sexually, chemically, ontologically, pretentiously — and my successful avoidance of Coke (the soda) became my one surviving trump card in a game of Never Have I Ever. It was no longer a stance but an extension of my identity. You don’t just give up being Catholic or liking Radiohead.

In short, I was awful. But in hindsight, I concede: It’s relatively easy to opt out of universality by opting in to something more fringe. If you want to know something few humans have known, you can go to space; or fuck your brother; or take up heroin, or the priesthood. For all our fascination with those tireless weirdos who crack the narrow band of human experience, it’s easy to forget that, on a fundamental level, becoming an anomaly just means signing yourself up. No disrespect to junkies or Neil Armstrong, but taking action is easy compared to total and passive abstinence. So many choices are made on our behalf before we’re old enough to opt out on principle. Even the snob who doesn’t have a television probably caught an episode of Sesame Street at some point. Most American vegetarians ate meat before cultivating politics and/or food-based affectations. In twenty-four years of never trying Coke, I’ve done something remarkable just by doing nothing.

But the takeaway, to clarify, is not to conflate the remarkable with the laudable. Just because it’s noteworthy to fuck your brother that doesn’t mean anyone should be expected to clap. Over time, it becomes burdensome to sustain so much specialness, and soon you find yourself eager for the latest blockbuster, sympathizing with the ticky-tacky folks in your hometown, and choosing your shoes on the basis of comfort. Or at least, that’s where I’m at right now — exhausted from holding the pose for so long — which is why I’m ready to drink my first Coke.

How to Have a Coke

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he taste test begins at my desk in Queens with a clear line of sight across the way into Gourmet Deli on Onderdonk Avenue. It’s your standard sandwiches-and-lotto bodega —nothing fussy, nothing organic — a great place to buy a pack of 27s, smoke two, and throw the rest away from guilt. (I’ve heard.) Anyway, I could walk across the street right now, pay for a 20-ounce plastic bottle of Coke, crack the seal right in the store, and drink it next to the register. I suspect this is how most people drink Coke — without too much ceremony — and that sounds wonderful. As a matter of principle, I don’t stand for anything too pointlessly complicated in either direction. I wouldn’t be caught dead with my fingers in a jar of Sir Kensington’s Gourmet Ketchup, nor would I stray too far out of the way to hunt down the diviest or most authentic anything. A plastic-bottle Coke in the doorway of a bodega sounds, theoretically, refreshing. But it seems a too-careless way to set out to drink my first. Ordinary Coke drinkers cultivate their preferences over a lifetime of incidental trial and error. I have a deadline four weeks away.

Where to begin? Search: how to try Coke, revise to how to try Coca-Cola, and then finally drink my first Coke. A whole lot of info on how to quit drinking Coke, but nothing for beginners who are just starting out. There are WikiHow tutorials on how to breathe, how to pee, how to love, and how to cry, but drinking Coke apparently demands less instruction than functions which are naturally regulated by the brain.

I clear off my desk, pull out a legal pad, and explode a Coke into all its component parts. In column one I list possible variations on the liquid: classic, diet, cherry, Mexican, zero, vanilla, and caffeine-free. In column two, I make note of the trappings and tackle: straw, no straw, lemon, no lemon, bottle, fountain, can, ice, et al. Next to ice, with the guidance of a restaurant supply company website, I note six common shapes of machine-produced cubes: square, half cube, crescent, flake, gourmet ("top hat"), and (my favorite) the soft, chewable cylinders known variously as pearl, gem, chewblet, and tubular nugget. None of this accounts for the external variables like skin temp, mood, forecast, setting, food accompaniment, and company (or lack thereof). In hopes of narrowing the field of possibility, I set out to poll my friends on their preferences, assuming (naively) that advice will cluster around a handful or so prevailing recommendations. More surprising than the sweep and specificity of their tastes — which range from with Nyåkers Lemon Ginger Snaps to very cold and directly from the two-liter — is the fury with which each evangelizes for his preference.

In search of a trustworthy, verifiable authority, I email an archivist at Coke headquarters in Atlanta. I come to second guess this hope just as I hit send. Even if the archivist were willing to lend advice, what could Coke know about the best pour of Coke? The website for Q-Tips says a lot about arts and crafts but scant little about probing the depths of an ear canal. An effete shill for a vast multinational could never know anything of how the people take their Cokes. This proves a convenient conclusion when my email to the archivist returns an out-of-office reply. It’s now that I realize I’ve been going about it all wrong: There isn’t any one true authority to be discovered. Any opinion on Coke, like any view of God or the afterlife, can never be proven more credible than another.

Ordinary Coke drinkers cultivate their preferences over a lifetime of incidental trial and error. I have a deadline four weeks away.

I’m generally skeptical when I learn of a famous person with professed expertise disconnected from his main gig. Usually I assume that said expertise comes from brute-force spending (see: Jay Leno’s car collection) or the wise employ of some savvy PR girl (Emily Ratajkowski’s feminism, probably). Neither is the case for comedian Chris Gethard, who moonlights in his off hours as an expert on soda. Two weeks before I’m scheduled to drink the Coke, I reach him on the phone through a mutual friend.

By now, I’ve come to regard myself as something of an expert. Gethard, gently, cuts me down to size, launching into a 200s-level seminar that begins with the origin story of his soda podcast Fizzy Boys, segues into a ranking of independent colas (best first: Fentiman’s, Sprecher’s, Puma Cola, Nickel Cola, Mr. Cola), swerves into an impassioned speech on the historical role of Coke in the African-American South, and then on to some effusive praise for a man named John Nese at Galco’s Old World Grocery in Highland Park, Los Angeles. Gethard goes on like this for what ends up being nine transcribed pages, and by the time he circles back around to my predicament, I feel convinced I will take whatever advice he offers, even if his tip is to add a heavy pour of bleach.

"I’d really encourage you to drink a Mexican Coke first, because it uses real sugar and not corn syrup." He adds that Mexican Coke’s glass bottle is key — in terms of both flavor and effervescence — because what goes into glass is exactly what comes out. "It’s the glass bottle as much as anything else," he says. He tells me to drink the Coke on a hot day, after walking around sweating with the sun in my eyes. There are few joys as simple in his life, he tells me, as wiping condensation from an ice-cold glass bottle. As the call nears a close, his tone grows frank and firm. He concludes: "I will be very disappointed if I read this article someday and you didn’t go with Mexican Coke."

My intent from the outset had been to take-as-prescribed and trust in the wisdom of those who knew better. But when Gethard tells me to drink Mexican Coke, I’m overcome with the urge to spit in the phone. Really — Mexican Coke? Then again, what did I expect? Of course an earnest coastal alt-comic would endorse the hipster Coke, the one that’s marked up double and served as artisanal. Of course a man whose Wikipedia page mentions one — no two! — different Morrissey tattoos would fall for the romantic fantasy of real sugar. George Bush did not invade Iraq so I could have a wuss Coke in some fey Williamsburg taqueria. To have a Coke is to have a high-fructose corn syrup Coke like Jesus and Monsanto intended. The only good Coke is made in America, not imported from Mexico by the liberal fooderati.

Turns out, all along, I’d imagined speeding down the highway in a ’57 Chevy, trunk full of semi-automatics, corpse of George Washington propped up in the jump seat, super-sweet Coke in the one hand, ripped-out trachea of a dead commie in the other, manning the wheel with my hetero schlong, eyes towards the future of our great nation. Mexican Coke? The suggestion offends some deep, and until then unbeknownst, conviction. But still, I’m not so bold as to disappoint a celebrity, especially not one so calm and generous as Gethard. When Chris addresses me, even through the phone, I feel the same warm way I imagine some imports lobby would want me to feel upon hearing someone croon the words real sugar. I decide, at least, that I will sleep on his advice.

There are WikiHow tutorials on how to breathe, how to pee, how to love, and how to cry, but drinking Coke apparently demands less instruction than functions which are naturally regulated by the brain.

Some days later, in browsing Reddit for Coke-related factoids, I catch wind of a rumor that bottlers along the Rust Belt have somehow resisted the nationwide switch to sweetening Coca-Cola with high-fructose corn syrup. Allegedly, in Cuyahoga County and parts of the Lehigh Valley, scores of hard-working, red-blooded Americans quench their thirst with sucrose-sweetened American-made Coke. Sucrose is the extracted and refined sweetener from sugar cane — just naturally-occurring enough to taste real, without the cloying foodie tic of bragging about authenticity. For the first time in my life, I feel a Coke is calling to me.

I get on the phone with Sue at Abarta, the company that owns the alleged sucrose bottlers. She confirms: Yes, Abarta Cokes are made with sucrose. I’m mentally renting a ’57 Chevy when she circles back and spoils the fantasy — Abarta distributes Coke in cans and plastic only. I’m visited by the image of plunging my hand into a cooler and wiping the sweat from an ice-cold glass bottle. I’ve been convinced by Gethard that glass is non-negotiable, and so it seems I’ve backed myself into a pick-two predicament: glass bottle, real sugar, or American legacy.

If I drink sucrose Coke in Cuyahoga County, I assume liability for any flatness that might result from settling for a can or plastic bottle. If I opt for Gethard’s Mexican Coke, then I say fuck you to an American icon (and, in the process, feed into the worst foodie ideology). Coca-Cola Classic, bottled in America, is still available in the original glass — though corn syrup has long since bastardized its formula. It’s both a delight and a letdown to find a lapse in capitalism in which no amount of money can get me what I want. Or rather, upon coming across this vulnerability in the market, I feel called to interrogate what I want and why I want it. Is the ideal of Coke the Coke that’s closest to history, or is it Coke the way that most people drink it? And if the typical Mexican in 2011 drank twice as many Cokes as the typical American — and the typical American was drinking high-fructose corn Coke — then who could even say which Coke is the most Coke?

A Condensed History of Coca-Cola, to Further Confound Things

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he whole story is so stylized and cloaked in mythology that it’s hard to figure out how Coke came into being, but as far as I can tell, it went roughly like this: Coca-Cola began in Georgia as Pemberton’s French Wine Cola, the invention of pharmacist John Stith Pemberton. A wounded Civil War vet hooked on morphine, Pemberton wanted something to wean him off the hard stuff. Inspired by the French drink Vin Mariani, his nerve tonic mixed wine with a blend of kola nuts and coca leaf. Kola nuts offered flavor and caffeine, while the coca leaf and alcohol metabolized together to form cocaethylene, a stimulating euphoriant. Like future combinations of booze and blow, the cocktail was popular with white intellectuals, who were allowed in the soda fountains in which it was served. When statewide prohibition passed in 1886, Pemberton swapped the wine for flavored sugar syrup, and thus the soft drink Coca-Cola was born.

This new booze-free libation was marketed as a temperance drink, despite the fact that it still contained cocaine. Bottling began in 1899, making Coke available to both black and white consumers. Around the turn of the century, cocaine use was surging, and the growing health crisis was leveraged to credit bogus concerns about "negro coke fiends" raping white women. In 1903, in response to the white panic, the cocaine in Coca-Cola was replaced with more caffeine. The drink had assumed the modern outline of itself: caffeine, soda water, sweetened syrup, flavoring.

The flavor called cola is hard to nail down, but as far as I can tell, Coca-Cola is the referent. Cola, in my imagination, is spicy like Christmastime and alkaline like licking a nine-volt battery. I’m inclined to use the word pointy to describe it, though I suspect that’s my brain evoking carbonation to compensate for the absence of any real taste knowledge. If you go around asking what Coca-Cola tastes like, the response you’ll likely get is that it tastes like Coca-Cola. A flavor industry hotshot describing this phenomenon might call Coca-Cola a high-amplitude product. Cap’n Crunch is high-amplitude, as is Hellmann’s mayonnaise. In high-amplitude foods, flavors reconcile inside a single gestalt, cultivating an experience so dense and smooth that individual tastes resist piecemeal dissection; ergo, Coke just tastes like Coke.

The Coca-Cola Company feeds the Coke-Is-Coke rep by branding its formula as the world’s "most closely guarded and best-kept secret." At the World of Coca-Cola attraction in Atlanta, visitors can "see the legendary vault where the Coca-Cola formula is secured." It’s hilarious to imagine a purpose-built vault ostentatiously protecting a tiny scrap of paper, though it’s unclear which recipe a thief might find inside — the original Pemberton’s French Wine Cola, the current high-fructose corn syrup concoction, the coked-out "temperance" version of the drink, or any of the other bygone variants.

The nutrition label on our current Coca-Cola lists the ingredients of the drink as such: carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup, caramel color, phosphoric acid, natural flavors, caffeine. In speculative recipes posted online — many of which claim to be authentic or original — the natural flavors tend to be imagined as some blend of coriander, lemon, nutmeg, neroli, orange oil, vanilla, and Chinese cassia. It’s unlikely speculation.

George Bush did not invade Iraq so I could have a wuss Coke in some fey Williamsburg taqueria. To have a Coke is to have a high-fructose corn Coke like Jesus and Monsanto intended.

I could gush at length about the intrigue of the flavor industry — Raffi Khatchadourian does so very well here — but here’s the abridged spiel on natural flavors: Since the Food Additives Amendment of 1958, the term has been allowed as a catchall ingredient to describe any combination of the naturally-occurring additives "generally recognized as safe" by the FDA. So if Coke did come from orange oil and neroli, the company could just print natural flavors on the label. But the art of flavoring is impressionistic, not representational. For instance, orris root extract is sometimes used to evoke raspberry, while a common route to vanilla is through the anal glands of a beaver with a yellowish secretion known as castoreum. If one were, for whatever reason, inclined to avoid either, the term natural flavors would be of little use.

Natural flavors also masks supply chain and changes in formula. If find your favorite ice cream all of the sudden tasting different, you have no way of knowing if the beaver ass juice has been removed and replaced with the flavoring for a lesser vanilla. This is relevant, given that some of the flavors in Coke syrup are subcontracted to experts at flavor companies like Givaudan. Consider an anecdote from the Khatchadourian story:

Several years ago, a Givaudan employee attending a convention accidentally let slip to a reporter for Beverage World that the company had made a vanilla flavor for Coca-Cola. After the comment was published, Givaudan executive acted as if a state secret had been breached: they investigated the leak, restricted all information about their business with Coke to employees working directly for the company, and flew to Atlanta to visit the Coca-Cola headquarters and apologize in person. In the world of flavor, it is not enough to keep secret a chemical formula.The idea that Coca-Cola is an evolving entity, made in collaborative effort, with variable parts, flies in the face of the valuable myth that a Coke is a Coke is a Coke is a Coke. Apologies to the president, Elizabeth Taylor, the bum on the corner, and Andy Warhol himself, but it’s simply not true that all Cokes are the same. A Mexican Coke is not an American Coke, and Coke in Cuyahoga County is different from Coke in Queens. Burger King Coke is not McDonald’s Coke because the golden arches ups the syrup to account for inevitable dilution by ice; Passover Coke, bottled with a yellow screw top in the springtime, is labeled with corn syrup but actually contains sugar to accommodate the ritual avoidance of grain. There is no original or authentic Coke, because the recipe has fluctuated for as long as it’s existed, in response to agricultural subsidies, legislative changes, and racist fear mongering on the part of white folks. The recipe may have changed ten times over in your lifetime, and thanks to natural flavors, you have no way of knowing.

The singular Coke is an appealing myth, as is the singular Coca-Cola enterprise. We tend to think of Coke as a corporate monolith when it’s really a network of contingent corporate monoliths. The Coca-Cola Company writes on their website, "While many view our Company as simply ‘Coca-Cola,’ our system operates through multiple local channels." For most of history, The Coca-Cola Company didn’t even sell soda, only cola-flavored syrup and advertised romance. Manufacture of the beverage was left to regional franchisees, who packaged and shipped the drink across territories. Abarta is one of these independent bottlers, but the largest is Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated (NYSE: COKE), of which The Coca-Cola Company (NYSE: KO) owns around a twenty-eight percent share.

Recipe for High-Fructose Corn Syrup By Maya Weinstein, adapted and modified from King Corn, with permission from Curt Ellis Maya Weinstein is an artist who distilled high-fructose corn syrup for her MFA thesis, to expose the "mystery and and science behind the production of HFCS" through "direct representation and interaction" Ingredients

8 cups water

1 drop sulfuric acid

2 cups ground corn

1 teaspoon alpha amylase

1 teaspoon glucose amylase

1 teaspoon xylose

2 droppers glucose isomerase Method

Bring to a boil 8 cups of water and add 1 drop of sulfuric acid

Heat on Stove to 140F, reduce heat to low

Add 2 cups corn and soak overnight at 140F

After soaking add 1 teaspoon alpha amylase

Stir and allow to become viscous and thin

Cool to room temperature

Add 1 teaspoon glucose amylase

Pour corn slurry over cheesecloth lined bowl

Sprinkle over 1 teaspoon xylose

Add 2 droppers glucose isomerase

Strain liquid from corn and dispose of corn

Pour strained liquid back into pot and heat to 140F

Bring to a boil for 1 minute, simmer 15 more minutes

Pour into a glass jar and enjoy

The magic of the so-called Coca-Cola System is how it warps and folds back itself to realize conflicting ideals: local autonomy and global legibility, endogenous individualism and harmless universality. The best way, perhaps, to conceive of Coca-Cola is to imagine it as a kind of Theseus’ paradox, in which the ingredients and the supply chain can be altered indefinitely as the product itself somehow still remains a Coke.

But destabilizing a Coke until it barely exists doesn’t change the fact that I’ve committed to drink one, nor does it settle the Mexican Coke dilemma. I decide to order some high-fructose corn syrup and test it against table sugar in my morning cup of coffee. Then I will know if the sweetener thing is hype. But when I log on to Amazon, I can’t find it anywhere — same eBay, same Etsy, same Google Shopping. It turns out that HFCS is available only in: a) by-the-barrel quantities from factories in Shenzhen, or b) non-food-grade quality from online beekeeping supply companies.

I email an artist named Maya Weinstein, who distilled HFCS for her MFA thesis. I say I will meet her in any dark alley and compensate her handsomely for a vial of her product. Weinstein replies that her stash has run dry, but courteously passes along her recipe, which calls for, not least, glucose amylase, xylose, and sulfuric acid. I learn I’m insufficiently credentialed to order lab-grade chemicals to my home. Later that week, stressed in the grocery store, I note my impossible nearness to so much high-fructose good stuff. If only there were a way to boil down granola bars and try out the sweetener to taste in isolation. Forced to retire the idea of the taste test, I realize I’m going to drink Mexican Coke.

Have a Coke

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ethard said only to drink the Coke on a hot day, after walking around sweating with the sun in my eyes. He said only that there are few joys as simple in life as wiping condensation from an ice-cold glass bottle. He said nothing else to explain how, when, or where.

Up late into the night, worrying about soda, I initiate a Google search: famous Coke commercial. I want a visual depiction of drinking Coke on a hot day. The top result is the 1971 ‘Hilltop’ commercial, which opens with with a blonde-haired, blue-eyed singer: I’d like to buy the world a home and furnish it with love. Acoustic finger-picking comes to join her and the camera begins to pan gently outward. We see a Ken doll in a turtleneck with a Nordic feel, a curly haired man holding an Arabic Coke, a black teenager holding an Ethiopian Coke, and another teen in a Nehru jacket. The young people all hold Cokes in their hands and sing together into the vague middle distance — I’d like to teach the world to sing, in perfect harmony. There is more gentle panning across more multicultural faces, more love and harmony. This global Coke diaspora sings together in English. The shot pulls back to reveal a sweeping aerial, singers in formation atop a grassy hill. A stilted poem appears on the screen:

On a hilltop in Italy, We assembled young people From all over the world… To bring you a message From Coca-Cola Bottlers All over the world. It’s the real thing. Coke. Trademark

I wake up the next morning to consult a topographic map, which suggests suitable elevation in nearby Forest Park. On a satellite map, the hilltop looks grassy, through there’s no way knowing outside of just going there. I get on my bike and ride to the Food Bazaar, an international market on the corner of Gates Avenue. I buy a cooler, a bag of ice, and a Mexican Coke. I pack the Coke in the ice like a transplant organ, and start riding across Queens with the cooler on my back. I think of spicy Christmas and nine-volts as I pedal. I think of how pointy tastes, and how sugary cereal makes your teeth feel like terrycloth. I do not imagine that I will like drinking Coke.

It’s not immediately evident that I’ve reached Forest Park. First the houses along the road are replaced by gravestones, then these cemeteries turn into children playing baseball. I veer into the park and dismount my bike, fingering a bottle opener as I walk towards the hill. I lock my bike to a bench near the base and start hiking through the grass towards the ridge along the top. It’s two in the afternoon and 53 percent humidity; the sun is in my eyes, and my shirt is soaked with sweat. I sit down and plunge my hand into the cooler, then use my hem to dry the ice-cold glass bottle. There’s the crisp fizz-pop of a cap being pried. I lift the Coke to meet my lips.

Interlude: On Trying

Here, with apology, I have reason to pause and address a few concerns about the enterprise of trying, but first I must confess to some narrative jiggering. Writing about trying tends to tangle the timeline. If a major appeal of watching someone try is watching them stumble through an alien experience, then some of that appeal, not to mention some honesty, would be lost by reconstructing the naive stumbling in hindsight. Once you try you can’t go back to not knowing, and in this way it seemed more narratively earnest to fabricate in foresight a few paragraphs of bicycling than feign curiosity in hindsight for over four-thousand words. So, to come clean: Everything up to and through the end of this interlude has been written by a real, true Coca-Cola virgin. Everything that follows will be written post-Coke.

The singular Coke is an appealing myth, as is the singular Coca-Cola enterprise. We tend to think of Coke as a corporate monolith when it’s really a network of contingent corporate monoliths.

If I could’ve thought of a way to write while sipping, then I could’ve written this essay as a continuous transformation, but neither computer hardware nor the technology of grammar has sufficiently evolved to write through flashpoint change. This might account for why video has emerged as the native format for trying-related content. Video doesn’t demand any narrative finagling to capture the precise moment when trying turns to tried. We see the baby’s face contort as he licks his very first lemon. We see Buzzfeed protagonists make bland exclamations as they try durian, absinthe, British snacks, women’s underwear, simulated labor, menstruation, Surströmming, and Singaporean food.

But what is all this trying even good for? You never know until you try, the saying goes, but it doesn’t guarantee what we’ll know afterward, if anything. It never hurts to try, someone says, selling trying as a form of non-committal curiosity — but how much can such curiosity even get us? All over the world, people are drinking Coke, but even if the formula were exactly the same, who could ever confirm the similarity of the experience? In this way trying over-promises itself.

Bong-rip caliber theorizing aside, though, I really do believe in some stable shared experience, and that trying somehow inches us in that direction. But at what threshold does trying convert to doing? Try comes from the French trier, to sift. By definition, to try is to grasp certain parts of an experience, while letting some other parts fall through our fingers. The never hurts appeal of trying is that it lets us explore without the risk of being changed, but our fascination with watching people try is that exact flashpoint moment in which they come to be changed. In this way, either doing is just progressively novel trying, or trying reveals little about the thing it seeks to understand.

Had a Coke

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he initial sip was grotesquely stilted, drawn in with cartoon pucker of an undesirable kiss. Coffee self-regulates its own depletion as it cools, and water is consumed in direct relation to thirst, but Coke offers no such obvious sipping pattern. I moderated the flow of liquid carefully to avoid the stinging aneurism of too much carbonation. These were needless precautions. Soon I found that sipping became intuitive. Like breathing and peeing, my body knew how.

The taste was earthier or more organic than I’d expected — the liquid less viscous, the bubbles unpointy. I came to understand how something could taste smooth. I’d long understood smooth as a misapplied texture word, an impossible flavor dream cooked up by copywriters. But alas: Coke is smooth. The flavor stays continuous even in its complexity. There’s nothing more to say except that Coke tastes like Coke.

It felt like something I’d been born to consume. Or maybe like something engineered in a lab to trigger the lobe that signals refreshment. I felt refreshment, followed by self-consciousness. I was alone in the park, save for a few dog walkers, but I felt shameless and dirty to be sitting out in the open, unhanding a resentment with so little resistance. I contorted my brain away from self judgment and took long sip of soda — I liked the Coke.

After 12 minutes, the bottle was empty. I wasn’t sure if I’d done it all correctly, but as time went by, I felt awake and reenergized. I sat for a moment in the sun on the hilltop, then got back on my bike and rode the four miles home. The Coke I drank was very good. I couldn’t possibly say anything about any of the other ones.

Jamie Lauren Keiles writes about daily life on and off the internet.

Natalie Nelson is an illustrator and the author of the picture book, The King of the Birds, published by Groundwood Books.

Edited by Matt Buchanan

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