MOVIE REVIEW OF ...
King Corn

One of the interviews in King Corn is with a food scientist who explains that high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) wasn't used much until the 1970s because it was expensive to make. Improvements in extraction technology and a newly swelling corn harvest—a result of an intentional overproduction strategy instituted by the US Department of Agriculture—meant that HFCS was suddenly available, cheap, and looking for a market. At one point a spokeswoman for the sweetener industry proudly tells us that by the late 1980s, HFCS had already taken over 50% of the sweetener market.

Hmm, yes. Here's a delicious little diversion related to that fact. Some of you may remember the "New Coke fiasco" of the early 1980s. Coca-Cola dropped its original Coke formula and, with great fanfare, introduced New Coke. The stated marketing strategy was that New Coke would be better able to compete with the sweeter Pepsi taste. But New Coke was a flop, and in fairly short order, the company introduced Coke Classic, which they claimed was the same as the original Coke. But anyone who bothered to compare the ingredients on a can of Coke Classic to those on a can of hoarded original Coke would have seen that the sugar in the latter had been replaced with high-fructose corn syrup, which by then was the cheaper sweetener.

There were grumbles from the Coke-drinking hoi polloi that Coke Classic didn't seem to taste quite the same as original Coke—and it didn't, of course—but Coca-Cola's marketing blitz proclaiming that everything had returned to normal was eventually accepted by the public. Of course, one thing had definitely changed—Coke was now a more profitable product since the most expensive ingredient in the can, sugar, had been replaced with a cheaper substitute.

So, did Coca-Cola have the whole thing planned out all along—a stratagem in which they envisioned creation of a new product that could compete head-to-head with Pepsi and then an "intentional fiasco" that would provide cover for them to do an ingredient switcheroo on the original product, which they planned to keep all along? Not to mention all the free media attention! Or was it just a huge mistake on the part of Coca-Cola's research and marketing departments? You decide.

In any event, that was about the time I decided that drinking sodas was a pretty unhealthy thing to do anyway, and the changed taste of Coke Classic made it easy. Thank you, high-fructose corn syrup!

-- Mark Jeantheau, Grinning Planet founder, reformed Coke lover