Random Thoughts on Drink and Food (a weird one)

Part 1 - Drink:
I was at a restaurant today, standing in front of the soda dispenser, trying to decide what to drink when I noticed that it had orange soda. I haven't seen orange soda as an option lately, and it made me a bit nostalgic. I remember a time when orange soda was the only soda I ever drank - I was very young and not allowed to drink soda very often, but whenever I could, orange soda is what I wanted - I thought it was the best stuff. What's odd is I don't like orange soda anymore, not even just a glass for "old times' sake." As I got older, root beer was my soda of choice. I remember lamenting the fact that restaurants rarely had root beer, and I was forced to have Dr. Pepper instead. Now, I prefer Dr. Pepper; on the rare occasion I do have root beer, it's too sweet for me.

All this brought me to one conclusion: I drink too much soda.

Part 2 - Food:
Have you noticed lately that candy bars are changing, trying to be the next new thing? Kit Kats come in white chocolate or dark chocolate. Crunch bars come in a cylinder wafer form. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups come in crunch, caramel, or reverse. I once read somewhere that people have smaller attention spans now and constantly need new and exciting things. Could that be what the new candy is all about? Is the sugar high really not enough? As far back as I can remember, if you wanted caramel, you got a Twix or a Milky Way; if you wanted peanut butter, you got Reese's; if you wanted wafers, you got Kit Kat. It was always the same... and it was always good.

Going for nostalgia again - I remember when I was a kid there was a 7-11 about a block away from school. Before basketball games, my friends and I would beg some change off our parents (most of us were teachers' kids so a parent was there), head off to the 7-11, and come back with our favorite candy bar or Slurpee. On lucky, rare excursions, one or two of us would come back with candy AND a Slurpee. How cool we felt then! Anyway, I remember being so excited by a plain, regular bar of Hershey’s chocolate. I never needed mini M&Ms mixed in it. (Unrelated note – it’s been a really long time since I’ve had a Slurpee, but I guess that’s another blog.)

I think I'm turning into an old fogey. "Back in my day, chocolate was just chocolate; we didn't have this newfangled candy you whippersnappers have these days," she said in the unmistakable lisp of a women whose dentures were slipping...