An essay on Wild Cherry Pepsi.

I live blissfully unaware of the world around me. Hence, it was only a few days ago when I learned about Wild Cherry Pepsi. Without looking, I grabbed a Pepsi can from a store shelf and started drinking it. Surprisingly, a well familiar taste of sweetened sodium hydrophosphate intermingled with benzaldehyde’s acrid chemical flavor. Confused, I inspected the bottle. It looked like a regular Pepsi can but it carried a image of luminescent bright red berries and it had words “wild cherry flavor with other natural flavors”. My feeble brain struggled to reconcile multiple contradictions provided by visual, verbal and tasting clues.

Obviously no cherries, domesticated or wild, taste like benzaldehyde. Why not call it Pepsi with benzaldehyde flavor? It would more way sense. Also, cherries can be brown, white or dark red, but absolutely no cherries ever have radioactive color depicted on the can. Oh, wait, there is an exception – Maraschino cherries. If you soak cherries in potassium thiosulfate and bleach for a few weeks and add FD&C red 40, then they will indeed acquire such color. But then, Pepsi should’ve called the drink Maraschino Cherry. And to keep true to the taste, Pepsi should use the delicate mixture of thiosulfate, chlorine bleach and FD&C rather than benzaldehyde.

Also, why wild cherries in particular? Firstly, there are no wild cherries in North America. So-called wild cherries are actually domesticated variety trees brought from Europe that eventually escaped captivity and ran into the Great American Wilderness. Secondly, wild cherries somehow, however, irrational it may feel, associate with benzaldehyde taste and radioactive red color even less their domesticated brothers do. Are there other connotations to wild cherry term? Could it be that they meant “wild” cherries as opposed to “tame” ones? Did the branding department suggest a slogan Get Wild With Our Wild Cherry Pepsi? Or could it have a sexual connotation aimed at certain male users? Pop our Wild Cherry Pepsi can like you deflower a beautiful wild virgin? Pop 72 cans of Wild Cherry Pepsi and you will feel like you reached Muslim Paradise?

Whatever turns you on, enjoy your Wild Cherry Pepsi drink!