Second Negative

Hazardous to your Health

It’s possible that I have a saccharine addiction. It’s largely because of the region I grew up in, but my favorite drink has always been iced tea. People who don’t use artificial sweetener on a regular basis might try to convince you that all sweeteners are the same. I suppose I can understand that level of ignorance. I used to scoff at the idiots buying bottled water because I insisted that “they all taste the same”. Years later when I started drinking a lot more water I realized that they actually taste very different, and some are fairly awful. I stopped at a convenience store one afternoon and asked for a particular brand of water that it turned out they did not have. The clerk suggested that I purchase Ozarka instead, since it was on sale and because “it’s all the same anyway”. After telling the clerk that Ozarka was crap (and by extension, that he was an idiot), I realized I had become “that guy”.

So, getting back to the sweetener problem, we ate a late lunch out at Hill’s Cafe in South Austin this past weekend. I ordered my usual iced tea, and then reached for the pink packet, but it wasn’t there. I stood up and frantically searched the nearest tables, but they were also empty. The waitress came over to get our food order, and I inquired with just the right amount of incredulousness in my voice, “Do you guys have any Sweet & Low”? And after making that face people sometimes make while saying they are sorry, but silently not giving a damn, she replied, “No we don’t have that stuff anymore, we switched it with Splenda”. My saccharine deficient brain struggled to process this new information. Splenda? Splenda doesn’t contain saccharine. You want me to drink my tea without using a sweetener that has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals? Are you kidding me? I’ll kill everyone in this place, I swear to God. Why does Nicole keep telling me to calm down? Are other people looking at our table? How dare they judge me.

Well, after that episode, I was forced to resort to a couple of Equals. Yeah, I could have tried Splenda, as suggested, but Nicole informed me that Splenda is disgusting. It’s my controversial opinion (in Texas at least) that putting regular sugar in iced tea is also disgusting. I’m not looking for sweetened tea. Who the hell needs that? I’m looking for tea with the taste of saccharine, and saccharine doesn’t taste like sugar. No ma’am.

If at this point, you’ve started to wonder about the point of all this, I’ve got bad news for you. There isn’t one. You waited over a week for this post, and it’s just a rant about artificial sweetener. It might be time to delete that link to my site. But I’ll tell you one thing. I’m going to start carrying a couple of emergency Sweet & Low’s in my wallet. Otherwise, it could get pretty ugly.