From: Wade T.Smith (wade_smith@harvard.edu)
Date: Sun 15 Dec 2002 - 18:05:00 GMT
Run, do not walk, and buy the Times today, and read the magazine's main
article, The Year in Ideas. Fascinating stuff, almost all of it relevant
to memetics.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/index.html
Here's one of 'em-
Toxic-Colored Soda
By JAIME WOLF
So it has come to this. Time was, soda pop was made with natural
flavorings. (Cola is, after all, a nut.) Even when new soft drinks began
to achieve their unique flavor bouquets through the addition of man-made
ingredients -- even then, even if nobody was being fooled -- realism
remained the governing beverage aesthetic, the point still being to
simulate the look of something a person might conceivably encounter at a
juice bar. But suddenly it's as if an edict were issued requiring that
the contents of the top shelf of your refrigerator be indistinguishable
from that of the closet where you keep your cleaning fluids. This year
there has been an explosion of soda drinks in Crayola mufti: fire-engine
red (Mountain Dew Code Red, if you want to name names), radioactive
chartreuse (dnL, the new drink from 7-Up) and, most startlingly, Pepsi
Blue.
Perhaps it was inevitable. We eat black pasta and purple ketchup. We
drink green, yellow and pink vitamin-infused water. (Colored water! We
drink colored water.) Decades ago psychologists conducted tests in which
people offered food in garish, nonstandard colors (black milk, green
eggs) exhibited a decrease in appetite. Clearly we have crossed some
Rubicon: baroque artificiality has become the norm, and now a cola drink
the same transparent aquamarine shade of Windex is flying off the
shelves.
What, precisely, is Pepsi Blue supposed to be? The label on the bottle
identifies the flavor as ''Berry Cola Fusion.'' Blueberry? Raspberry?
Who knows? The ingredients list no fruit or berries, just ''flavors.''
Nonetheless, since its introduction in August, the 20-ounce size of
Pepsi Blue has become one of the better-selling soft drinks in
convenience stores. It looks like a hit. Common wisdom in the soft-drink
business holds that a brand's success can't really be measured until it
lasts an entire summer season, so the jury remains out as to whether
this new Pepsi will last as long as its caramel-colored ancestor. Still,
everyone is familiar with the old saw about imitation and flattery, and
so perhaps all we really need to know is that Coca-Cola has moved to
close the blue-beverage gap with Fanta Berry, its own unnervingly
nonspecific ''berry''-flavored, swimming-pool-water-hued concoction.
It's new. It's blue. Get used to it.
Copyright The New York Times Company
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sun 15 Dec 2002 - 18:06:20 GMT