Why is this time of year different from all other times of year? Because this is the one time when the interests of observant Jews and the interests of serious foodies—and especially Coca-Cola fans—converge.

That's because the Jewish holiday of Passover is once again upon us. During Passover, Jews are forbidden to eat a category of grains known as kitniot, which includes corn. The Ashkenazi rabbis who came up with this stricture many centuries ago probably didn't foresee how their edict would collide with the invention of high fructose corn syrup (or maybe they did—they were pretty smart dudes). But the end result today is that there are all sorts of HFCS-sweetened products that are kosher for most of the year but are not kosher during Passover. In some cases, special Passover editions of these products—sweetened with cane sugar, which is Passover-sanctioned, instead of HFCS—appear on the market in the weeks leading up to the holiday. And chief among these products is Coca-Cola.

Coke, of course, used to be made with cane sugar. But as with most American sodas and countless other processed foods, the sugar was replaced by HFCS after the latter's rise to prominence in the late 1970s. So Passover is when Coke gets back to its sucrose roots, so to speak. The sugar-sweetened version, which is distributed in areas with significant Jewish populations, is easy to spot: Just look for the yellow caps.

The reason for Passover Coke's popularity among the gastronomic elite: People think it tastes better.

The thing is, many of the people buying Passover Coke aren't Jews. They're goyim food geeks who prefer sugar over HFCS and snap up the Passover Coke as soon as it hits the stores each spring. (Mexican Coke, which is still made with sugar, can sometimes be found in America, albeit at a significant markup. It enjoys a similarly rarefied status in the foodie-verse.) One reason for this is that HFCS has become a sort of all-purpose bogeyman for the Michael Pollan wing of the foodie set, handily symbolizing a host of societal ills including obesity, corporate chicanery, synthetic foodstuffs, misguided farm subsidy policies, and so on.

The other reason for Passover Coke's popularity among the gastronomic elite is much more straightforward: People think it tastes better.