African proverb: Wanna Fanta?

Yes. Yes I do want one. The real question is when don't I wanna Fanta? The answer so far is never. I can’t think of a time when I wouldn’t want a crusty glass bottle of warm, lightly carbonated Nazi soda. It just might be my calling in life. I’ve given up on pretending to like manly drinks. I knew I was screwed when I discovered to my own dismay that my favorite beer was Blue Moon. You know, the kind that you squirt the orange slice into and sip lightly as you dive into the weekend gossip? I only saw one other guy have one and he had frosted hair and a white patterned shirt with the top two buttons undone, skin-tight pants (is that treated leather?) and ordering something vegan. It was in this bar in the Inner Harbor in Baltimore a few weeks ago and I was like totally chillin’ w/ my ladyfriends :) Ashley and Sarah lol...uh…I MEAN THESE TWO CHICKS THAT I WAS PIMPIN’ ON Y’KNOW!?!?! WE WERE SOOO WASTED DUDE!!!! YEAH BRO!!!! [high fives, high fives] *sigh* Anyway, there’s just something about fruity orangeness that I just can’t get enough of. Which is why I’m so darn full of Fanta right now.

Let me tell you about African soda for those unfortunate enough never to have had the opportunity of tasting it. Take your normal American Coke, remove all carcinogens, high fructose syrups, 1/3 of the carbonation and pretty much just use ingredients that are grown in like, fields, instead of pharmaceutical laboratories and you’ve got a half-liter of heaven. Seriously, American Coke is like the bizzarro version of African Coke. The sugar is like that amniotic fluid stuff they keep the humans in in The Matrix. You know the way it gums your saliva after you drink one so that when you spit and the saliva retains its covalent bonding so you can’t ever actually get rid of the crap, but you end up sucking it back into your mouth? EWW! And we’re actually swallowing that stuff? Aren’t we just turning all our fluids into glue? Instead of experimenting with different synthetic syrups to achieve a roughly sugar-like flavor, Africans decided to use REAL SUGAR. GENIUS!!! It’s pretty much just growing all over the place so why not, right? I just walked into my back yard yesterday with my current host-mom and just picked some cane and ate it. It was so awesome. I just straight up ate sugar and it tasted great. In my entire life in the States I don’t think I ever even understood where sugar came from let alone ate sugarcane. It’s a testament to how much cooler things are in Africa. For me the first stop in my journey of transformation was discovering that foods don’t in fact grow in cans and jars, but are originally a part of organic matter before being carted off to the processing plant.

So since we’ve got the sugar thing down, now we can move on addressing the other problems with the American soda formula. Now that the soda actually tastes good, there’s no need to keep all that heartburn-inducing carbonation to mask the flavor. Let’s just take remove about a third of it, make those bubbles a bit smaller, and you actually have a “soft drink” instead of a “bubbles-explode-in-your-throat-giving-you-a-stroke drink”. Again, some sensible Africans just decided that it was unnecessary to make soda taste like Pop Rocks.

Two down, last thing. Why chill it so much? In America you have to freeze your throat lining just to make the stuff taste good. Gotta have something to take your mind off that awful corn syrup and those exploding gaseous burp-bubbles right? Well in Africa you can actually have your drink higher than 33 degrees Fahrenheit and still taste good. It’s unbelievable. It’s much less stressful than searching for the absolute frostiest bottle you can find in the store then rushing to check out and guzzle the thing so it doesn’t have the chance to raise one degree of temperature and betray the fact that it actually TASTES BAD.

Anyway, non-potable drinking water doesn’t bother me in the least as long as I’ve gotta Fanta. It also takes care of the whole “cultural sensitivity vs. Covenant” thing for me. In Malawi nothing’s more culturally appropriate than a nice, smooth Fanta orange. Conflicted about breaking the Covenant during your internship? (Sarah Bagge, I know you are) take my advice and just knock back a Fanta and let your troubles trickle away.