In the Mountain West, the ‘Dirty’ Soda Rush Is On
www.nytimes.com
With locations now numbering in the hundreds, regional soda-shop chains are spreading far beyond Utah, where they first found popularity.

"What if we took soda, made it even less healthy, served it in styrofoam cups, and added a massive carbon footprint to the whole thing?"

Also, that picture in the article of the drive-through with like 7 identical looking cars...

    • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]
      ·
      3 years ago

      i worked with this lady in a rural community. she was like maybe in her 50s and very kind, but she drank coke like a maniac. like just all day. she said she knew she should drink more water, but didn't like the "taste". it should be noted, much of the drinking water in the region had been contaminated by industry since before she was born, and it had also worked to suppress any government messaging / response about it, so there was just a vague cultural distrust of water by older people. also bottled water was generally more expensive than a soda from the store, and this community was plagued by extreme poverty (if you couldn't guess).

      i, by contrast, grew up in the burbs and drank lots of soda because it was all over school, and at the shitty jobs i worked until my mid 20s, basically the only consistent perk was unlimited soda. i quit in my late 20s when i started hanging around people who made healthier choices and started accepting how fucked up it was, nutrition and health wise.

    • ssjmarx [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      that’s psycho shit

      It's just a habit that's easy to fall into, and while sodas don't contain anything that's chemically addictive, sweet drinks spike your dopamine in such a way that they can become addictive anyway.

        • ssjmarx [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          I hear you, not drinking water is like... have you ever sweat before? The best drink ever is cold water when you're thirsty, because your brain is hard wired to give you the good chemicals for drinking it.

          But still, I brought this up in another comment but I think 37 gallons in a year isn't nearly as much as it sounds. People need about 3.7 L of water per day (a gallon is about 4L), so the back-of-the-envelope amount of soda that the average person drinks is 10% of their fluid consumption. That's a 12 oz bottle of soda (one of these guys) per day.

            • ssjmarx [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              I bet it's similar to that of alcohol, where a small number of addicts drink half the soda and drive the average well above the median, but I'm not aware of data on this.