an elegy for aspartame

It’s officially almost football season, which means we’ve reached the point when, for the first time since I started writing this newsletter in earnest, I’ll have to balance my real job in its full force with this way-too-much-fun hobby. I’m determined not to miss a post, but I’m also pretty sure we’re in for some occasionally offbeat content. Things may get less gourmet at times, and my brain will definitely be fried. Let’s get a little weird.

At least twice a week for most of the past 25 years, my dad has driven himself to the local YMCA to swim laps and then made a quick stop at a gas station for a massive styrofoam cup of Diet Coke. He’s a surgeon, a fastidious, disciplined, active 68-year-old who also happens to spend some of his off hours clutching jumbo-sized vessels emblazoned with catchy, sometimes-alliterative names. Big Gulp. Polar Pop. When the St. Louis Cardinals score six or more runs, my dad beams. At the Mobil On the Run, he can get his soda for 60 cents the next day.

My dad’s car, a 14-year-old Honda Civic, is as clean as it was the day he drove it home from the dealership — that is, except for its backseat, which is usually littered with four or five (or 10) empty cups. I’m not entirely sure why, if he reuses them or if he likes concentrating his trash runs. Either way, the cup graveyard fascinates me. It’s like a monument on wheels to the one thing my family has always unequivocally loved.

You’ve heard the arguments: Diet Coke is bad for us. Diet Coke is going to kill its most ardent consumers. Diet Coke is going to make us each grow an extra arm, an extra head, an extra personality. Or, wait, actually — Diet Coke is no worse for us than all the other mildly toxic things we put in our bodies. Maybe Diet Coke isn’t bad, even if it’s not quite good. Diet Coke is just Diet Coke. 

behold

I am, of course, using Diet Coke as a proxy for all artificially sweetened sodas, and that’s because it is the Supreme Deity among diet sodas. For my family — a family whose habits lean more toward teetotaling than excess, a family of people who swim and walk and do hours a week of Pilates — there is only Diet Coke. There was Diet Coke at Steak ‘n’ Shake before I was old enough to do long division. There was Diet Coke in the soda machine after swim practice. There were two cold cans of Diet Coke, filched from the doctor’s lounge, in my dad’s coat pocket every night when he got home from work. And there was one summer morning in the late ’90s when my brother and I woke up for an early-morning golf lesson, and my mom scanned the pantry and offered us dry Life Cereal and Diet Coke for breakfast. I don’t recall objecting.

Until I left for college, I drank at least one can of Diet Coke a day. In college, less. As an adult, I’ve never once stocked Diet Coke in my fridge. It’s mostly faded from my life. Sure, if it’s a scorcher and I’m walking past a Walgreens, I’ll buy a bottle. On a road trip, maybe, too. But as the Erewhonification of beverages has taken hold in recent years, I don’t run into Diet Coke as much. It contains no adaptogens, no probiotics, no CBD, no vitamins, no water from the fountain of youth. If I’m looking for a little fizz, I’ll grab a kombucha or a Spindrift.

But I have to admit: Sometimes I crave a Diet Coke. I want nothing else but aspartame and not-so-certain death. 

I’m typing this from my parents’ house, a few steps from a fridge stocked with a tower of silver-and-red cans. Within a few hours of arriving, I’d had two, and I’ll have two more a day until I leave — and then I won’t drink that much Diet Coke in a month, much less a day, until I’m back here. So does that make it a guilty pleasure or just a knee-jerk reaction to sleeping in my childhood bedroom? Do I drink it because I want it, or because of years and years of muscle memory? Earlier today, a few hours after my morning indulgence, I tried to conjure the taste of the only soda I ever drink. And somehow, after so many thousands of them over the past 30-odd years, I couldn’t. How, I wondered, could someone be so enamored with something that tastes so utterly vague? But then I popped a can and gulped and remembered.

The beauty of Diet Coke is that it tastes like Diet Coke, like summertime and vanilla and sugar’s weird second cousin. It’s hydrating, kind of! It will cure the 2 p.m. computer-screen blues and the 10 p.m. standing-at-the-bar eyelid droops. It is fantastic to sip with cereal before an early round of golf and even better in a car with the windows rolled down. It’s a little bit precious, too, because its perfection is so fleeting; Diet Coke is delicious at first fizz and disgusting by the time it’s a hint of warm or a shade of flat.

So drink it fast and smash the can and take it out to the recycling already. There are guiltier pleasures to worry about than this.