Things don’t get any better with Coke

Wednesday, 14 January 2026

The world’s most famous fizzy pop - or, as Joe Bennett has it, Disneyland in a bottle.

Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.

OPINION: Some time last year I published a list of my pet hates.

Several readers suggested I should follow it with a list of loves, but I wasn’t falling for that. Rupert Brooke wrote such a list – blue and white crockery, crusty bread, footprints in dewy grass, that sort of sop – and look what happened to him: dead of streptococcal sepsis at 27.

Other correspondents asked what brassicas in general and broccoli in particular had done to upset me. I yearned to tell them of school cabbage. You knew there would be cabbage for lunch from about 10am, which is when they started to boil it, and the smell wafted in through every classroom window like parfum de Bromley Wastewater Treatment Plant. But that is all beside the point. The point is simply de gustibus non est disputandum, which translates roughly as you go ahead and eat as much broccoli as you like but don’t expect me to join in.

No matter how you dress it up - whether with a Coke or on its own - nothing will convince Joe to eat his broccoli.

And then there was the matter of Coca-Cola. “Why Coke?” asked one pithy correspondent.

Why indeed? I don’t hate Coke as such. It’s just fizzy pop and I liked it well enough when I was a little boy. But there, right there, is the point. Fizzy pop is for children. Its super-sweetness and primary colouring are aimed at childhood sensibilities. Fizzy pop is something you grow out of, like sucking your thumb or socialism.

As you grow up your metabolism slows, and your taste matures and you put away childish things and you learn to relish the great adult liquids of this life: coffee, wine, whisky. That Coke today is considered an acceptable drink for grown-ups is symptomatic of the babyfication of Western culture, and in particular of the United States of America.

Of course if you go on drinking sugar-laden drinks into adulthood you get fat, so they duly came up with Diet Coke, allowing adults to continue to wallow in infancy without the calorific consequences. And predictably, the man-child currently on the throne of the world drinks nothing else.

Like any infant, Trump consists only of his appetites, and in order to gratify them at any hour of day or night he has at his command the world’s largest and best-armed military, and two special buttons on his desk. One starts the nuclear war that ends the amusing human experiment, and the other summons a flunky with a Diet Coke on a silver salver. I am not making this up.

Because of its success Coke has spawned countless imitators, many of which are indistinguishable from the original. Indeed Coke’s best-known rival, Pepsi, has spent millions of dollars trying to show there’s no difference between the two drinks. But Pepsi misses the point.

The point about Coke is not what it is – just another fizzy pop – but what it has been made to seem to be. Decades of advertising have turned it into some mythological essence in the collective mind, associated with American patriotism at its most jingoistic and a sort of sickening white-toothed optimism. It’s Disneyland in a bottle.

And then there are the advertising slogans. A stream of vague absolutes – Always Coca-Cola; The Real Thing; Coke is It – assert that it is everywhere and perfect and definable only in terms of itself. In other words, this fizzy pop is god. That marketers try this stuff on is depressing enough. That it works is worse.

Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), greatest of all novelists, reckoned to despise everything that had happened in his life time, which he summarised as “plastics, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz”. The equivalent summary for my lifetime would just be Coke.