Protein, Pickles and Purists: There Are Many Ways to Drink Diet Coke
The New York Times
Opinions abound on how to customize the popular soda. Purists, meanwhile, will see you at McDonald’s.
The latest battle in the soda wars isn’t Coke versus Pepsi. It’s Diet Coke versus Diet Coke, and the fandom is bubbling over on social media.
Every week there seems to be a new cola add-on to try. In a video that divided the internet, the singer Dua Lipa showed off a concoction of Diet Coke mixed with pickle juice, jalapeño sauce, jalapeños and pickles. Before that, TikTok was flooded with the so-called Protein Diet Coke, which combines the soda with a vanilla protein shake. Search long enough and you will find people doctoring their Diet Cokes with milk, lemon, coconut or just about any other flavor imaginable.
On the other side of the spectrum are the Diet Coke purists. They are on social media discussing the “crispiness” of the soda in its various forms — canned, bottled and fountain — and many can nail the subtle differences in the Diet Coke Challenge, in which multiple “varietals” of the soda are shown to the audience but not the taster. To the purists, the Platonic ideal is a Diet Coke straight from the tap at McDonald’s, where the fountain sodas are still supplied with syrup from stainless-steel tubs, rather than from plastic bags.
“The only way to be a Diet Coke lover is to be a purist, and at this point I barely even accept a bottle as a real Diet Coke,” Keltie Knight, an E! News host who recently completed the Diet Coke Challenge, said by email. “Diet Coke is my best friend and my worst enemy.”
The purists have no trouble holding their ground against their amateur mixologist competition. However, the customization trend is only getting bigger, with seemingly everything suddenly being a potential mixer to go with your Diet Coke, harking back to the days of 1950s soda jerks customizing your drink while you waited.
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