Sane American Products

Here's something you won't see in Australia - not because it's crazy, because it's sane. Pepsi is tapping into a demand for boutique soft drinks by making versions of Pepsi and Mountain Dew with real sugar instead of high fructose corn syrup. Such a thing would be unnecessary in Australia because cane sugar is so cheap! I doubt that they'll win over those people who believe that New Coke was a big conspiracy but it's always good to see people rejecting HFCS.

We saw these bottles with their retro labels in the supermarket yesterday so I bought a bottle of Mountain Dew (I hate Pepsi so I doubt that real sugar would make me like it). Yeah, and apparently in the 60s Mountain Dew was sold with a bumpkin as their mascot. I now discover that the bottle I bought was not the original recipe, which I missed by a few months. Well I've never had the original recipe anyway so I'm not too bothered.

This may sound silly but if you've never lived in America you won't realise how, because of huge subsidies to corn farmers, high fructose corn syrup is the basis of all sweet things and is even added to things that shouldn't be sweet (like bread). Actually, there are also differences when you buy bags of plain old sugar. All the no frills brands are beet sugar and the expensive ones advertise that they're cane sugar. Because beet sugar doesn't go through the same refining process, you can't find big cheap bags of raw sugar, you have to buy demarara or turbinado or some other fancy name.