The Evolution of Drinking

Tomorrow is National Iced Tea Day! I just made a fresh batch of iced tea to celebrate. I’m already drinking some, but it’s not really super cold yet. It’ll be better tomorrow.

If you told me 10 years ago I’d love iced tea in the future, I would have laughed in your face. If you remained serious, I probably would have taken you for a psych evaluation. I’d find it easier to believe you telling me that I would be the mother of the humankind’s last hope than that I’d grow to love iced tea. A friend tried to get me to drink tea when I was like 11, and the only way I drank it was with almost the same amount of sugar as tea. Seriously, the sugar couldn’t even dissolve.

Sure, tastes can change, but if you plotted out my taste in drinks over the years on a graph, it’d be a very gradual curve for about 20 years of my life. Adding tea as a plot point would create such a huge spike that if it was on a seismograph, all the scientists of the world would freak out and announce the end of life as we know it.

It’s very easy to track the evolution of my taste in drinks, because as I said, the change was minimal for the majority of my life.

This, of course, is only if you exclude when I was a baby. My mother alleges that as a baby/toddler I was quite normal and drank milk, ate fruits, and all sorts of things that I’m just not sure I believe. There is absolutely no evidence to back her up.

Now starting with my memories, which are clearly more reliable, you have only one main drink when I was young. That was water. Milk disgusted me. It still does. Chocolate milk was okay, but it started to wear out its welcome as that was about the only thing I drank, since my mother was willing to accept it as a healthy alternative. I wasn’t really big on juice. Certain juices were acceptable, but I had very particular tastes.

I’m not sure at what age this started, but eventually I started to love diet coke/pepsi. My parents drank tons of it, and what probably started as small sips morphed into a lifetime love.

We traveled a lot when I was young, and I always caused the old ladies sitting with me on planes to cackle when I ordered a diet pop (because I almost always was the family member abandoned to sit with strangers. 4 people have to split up when airplane seats are ordered in 3s. In retrospect this was probably a wise decision by my parents. I simply can’t imagine strangers putting up with my brother for hours, and having always been an independent sort they knew I didn’t really care). “Are you on a diet, dearie??” They’d ask almost every time. I’d pout, because that’s like my main response to life, and all offended say “no!!! I just like it better!” Which was true. But granted, it’s probably a little weird when the 8 year old in pigtails and Winnie the Pooh overalls is ordering a diet pepsi.

This continued for years. My mother generally didn’t keep pop in the house (probably fearing I’d find it and drink it all. We had other problems in our house with things like icecream and cookie dough mysteriously disappearing) but my father really liked to eat out, and I was allowed to order it when we were out.

This might have continued indefinitely actually, but 2 big events happened that changed my drinking habits.

The first was that I went and stayed with my aunt for a week or two. I didn’t see much of my aunts and uncles because we didn’t live in the same area, but somehow it got arranged that I could go stay with my aunt in one of those Carolina states. I had a lovely time. I was a pre-teen, and my cousin was an older, super cool teenager, so I soaked up tons of teen-life wisdom. I also switched to regular pepsi, as that was the drink of choice in their house. So again, while it was a change, it was a small change.

It was only a few years though until I switched back to diet pepsi instead. This was mainly because I was now allowed to have pop at home, and the sheer amount I drank a day made me start to consider the calories involved, so having discovered I still enjoyed diet pepsi just as much, I switched back. The big difference then was my preference for pepsi over coke. As a kid, while I drank both I was more of a coke fan. As a teenager, I could drink coke if nothing else was available, but by god if my mother tried to convince me to buy coke just because it was on sale, we had some problems.

Because I <3 pepsi

If you know me at all, you might happen to know that at this point, I can admit I was actually addicted to diet pepsi. No one really considers this a real thing, but then again most people don’t drink it the same way I did. I drank NOTHING else. Water, occasionally, but that’s it. The worst years were early college, where I can say without exaggerating that I was drinking about 10 cans/glasses of diet pepsi a day.

So how did I end up drinking iced tea? Well, it’s mainly because of the 2^nd big event – a routine visit to the dentist. After the dentist became convinced I was bulimic because the diet pepsi was rotting away all of my tooth enamel, I started to cut down.

You have no idea how hard this was. I initially cut down to 4 a day, and I got myself some stickers so I could track my progress on the calendar. If I drank more than 4 I got a red star, which was bad. 4 was a blue star, 3 silver, and 1 or 2 a gold star. There weren’t many gold stars involved. After a few months I cut down to 3, and this was so hard that I decided I’d allow myself to stick to 3 with no further cutting back.

Sometimes the future looked a little bleak to me. When you’re 22, it’s miserable to imagine years spent constantly monitoring pepsi limits. But I didn’t have the strength to quit completely until last summer, after I went on a cruise with friends and

A.     They pestered me about it the whole time (apparently most people think my diet pepsi habits are unhealthy)

B.     I had less available (because apparently the cruise ship didn’t think people drank pop at 8 in the morning, so they wouldn’t provide it until afternoon)

C.     I realized that while it wasn’t pleasant, I could in fact survive without drinking it.

So I switched to tea, because while I was willing to give up pepsi I sure as sugar wasn’t willing to give up caffeine. A few months later I discovered that I even liked iced tea. And the good news is that even when I do things like buy a rt 44 size of iced tea from Sonic, I know that it’s still waaaaaaay better for me than the same thing with diet pepsi.