My Guilty Pleasure Is My Old Friend, Diet Pepsi

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.

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Diet sodas have been plummeting in popularity over the past number of years, their market share eaten into by everything from coffee to water. Diet cola’s current, most well-known lovers are a progressive’s nightmare of Bad White Men—Elon Musk famously photographed his bedside table laden with guns and cans of Diet Coke; while in office, Donald Trump was known to drink twelve cans a day. Score a billion for the reputation of coconut water, then. Anyway, myself, I hadn’t drunk diet cola in a while. When I was in high school and college, in the 1980s and ’90s, I drank it all the time. Why it was Diet Pepsi rather than the more popular Diet Coke is a mystery, possibly answered by Quebec’s long-standing affinity for Pepsi over other colas. Back then, my Diet Pepsi drinking was part of a routine of borderline-anorexic self-perfectionism that also included chains of Marlboro Lights (which we club kids would buy from the reservations) and sugar-free gum, plus very tight dresses and eccentric forms of teenaged calorie restriction that still managed to include poutine at 2 a.m. Diet Pepsi was not a place of health for me but rather of decadent control. And I needed some control here? I guess? Whatever the reason, back it came. The first can I drank was both exhilarating—it tasted like seventeen!—and bewildering. I am currently writing a cookbook with a big-time restaurant here in Montreal. I’ve been more attuned to taste. And frankly, I couldn’t figure out what this stuff tasted like. I brought a bottle to the restaurant’s sommeliers, and one decanted some into a wine glass, sipped, and shook his head, flummoxed. The final unhelpful consensus was that it tasted like faux sweetness and maximum carbonation. In other words, Diet Pepsi tastes like a process. And I was in a process. When the silver-bullet cans landed in my kitchen, next to the Greek yogurt and organic eggs and Moroccan olives, my teenaged daughter looked at me like I had placed a large bag of cocaine in the fridge. My younger, who is eight and a fan of the junkiest foods on earth, was dancing with excitement, because this was not some bubbly pleasure-ruse that smelled like blood orange; here were real soft drinks. And while I don’t want to end with a bow about how I stymied a booze issue with Diet Pepsi, the drinks did truly wean me off over-regularized wine. I don’t even need to drink Diet Pepsi when I am writing anymore. But I do have a can by my side now. Because I love Diet Pepsi. Like an old friend. And if that friend’s a bit toxic? Well, maybe life’s just a little more exciting for it. The post My Guilty Pleasure Is My Old Friend, Diet Pepsi first appeared on The Walrus.