Chocolate Soda

Have you ever wanted to drink a carbonated Tootsie Roll? Well, if you have then you're a) disgusting and b) in luck.

Canfield's Diet Chocolate Fudge brings back memories; horrid memories of projectile vomiting, diarrhea, jet lag, and the tumultuous transition from the place of my childhood to a frightening foreign land. No, this strange swill didn't cause any of these things but it's forever entwined with the experience.

In 1991 I came to the US with my family. I was young and it was my first time on a plane. The first four hours went fantastically but then I had my initial encounter with airline food. What followed during the remaining ten hours of the flight still exhausts me just thinking about it but there was one upside to the whole ordeal. It turns out that you can get through customs and immigration really fast if you have three children dry heaving so violently that their noses are bleeding... apparently that buys you an express ticket to the front of the line.

After a couple hours in the car we finally made it to our temporary destination where I was greeted with some very strange beverage choices, one of them being chocolate soda. I don't remember the brand so I can't blame Canfield for the resultant disaster but the stomach demons were awakened once again.

I was a little worried when I saw this stuff for sale at the local super market. Funnily enough, it wasn't with the rest of the sodas. Instead it was in a little section containing those strange diet teas (read: laxatives) and other oddities. Maybe the vomiting is actually a dieting tactic.

There isn't much to say about the taste beyond the Tootsie Roll juice description. I guess you could compare it to a very thin chocolate syrup, the cheapest kind you can buy. There's no sugar and the artificial sweetener is so overbearing that I could barely manage to swallow a couple mouthfuls. In fact, there's no nutritional value whatsoever, zeroes across the board.

This beverage was apparently incredibly successful for a few years in the 80s and I was about to say something like "and I can't imagine why" but then I reminisced with myself about that ridiculous decade for a couple seconds. And although these cans had probably been sitting on the shelf there since the early 90s, I didn't start vomiting this time but I wasn't able to get beyond a few sips so I might have if I had soldiered through the entire can. There's five left, who wants them? Drink at your own risk.