MARION NESTLE is hardly the first person to be appalled by the improbable success of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, those twin behemoths of the global corporate stage whose instant brand recognition and extraordinary cultural influence have been built on, of all things, the sale of carbonated sugar water.
The French were complaining about “Coca-colonization” as early as 1950, and the first alarmist medical reports about the effects of too much sugar on young metabolisms soon followed. Not that these did anything to slow the soda companies’ success; if anything, they were taken as confirmation that the companies had arrived. Coke and Pepsi were, for better or worse, symbols of a carefree, all-American optimism in the wake of two devastating world wars — a distillation of an idealized, eternal adolescence that broke with the strictures of an older generation. No surprise, then, that the more the grown-ups scolded, the more appealing the drinks became. The dyspeptic cultural critic George W. S. Trow recognized this in his 1980 New Yorker essay “Within the Context of No Context” and found it infuriating, one more indication of what he saw as the irredeemable vulgarity of popular culture. “Consider the real role in American life of Coca-Cola,” he wrote. “Is any man as well-loved as this soft drink is?” full: https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/capitalism-in-a-bottle _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
