I’ll begin by stating that this is not so much an essay about Diet Pepsi as it is about wine. I came out of the COVID-19 years drinking a glass of wine a day, two if I was writing, in addition to my usual weekend consumption of plentiful wine over dinner with friends. Nearly everyone in my world here in Montreal, where people are sharp and thinky and food obsessed and nobody wants to be a party pooper, told me that my kind of drinking was no problem. Still, it bothered me. Because wine felt like a new anvil of wanting sitting in the middle of my life, another layer to manage in an internal world already painfully overabundant with desire.
I was not going to become teetotal. But I needed a replacement strategy for my at-home wine—mainly, the wine that accompanied the writing, which I saw as my slipperiest slope. So I went to the supermarket to find the most explosively fun drink I could drink instead. I scanned past all the irritatingly good-for-you millennial soft drinks, all those seltzers with a spritz of pomegranate, and Italian-ish things that are some variation on Orangina, and landed in the very bad, corn syrupy place: the root beer, the Coke, the Sprite, the Pepsi. And then I saw the other bad place—the Diet Coke, the diet ginger ale, the Diet Pepsi, all the aspartame and papery, chemical tastes and weird, counterproductive diet culture. And I was like: Yeah. I’m gonna be this kind of bad—twentieth-century diet-cola bad.
