Has someone been reading The Shangri-La Diet (2006)? In 2009, the Coca-Cola Company began offering new Coke machines (Coca-Cola Freestyle) that are close to what I proposed in the last chapter. They produce great diversity of flavor because you can mix many different flavors. Your soft drink, with or without sugar, can be different each time.
According to this curiously-worded article, they did not get the idea from me:
The self-serve fountains — which represent a complete departure from anything The Coca-Cola Company has offered previously — were in development for more than four years prior to launching in 2010.
In The Shangri-La Diet, I proposed adding random flavoring to your food so that it tastes different each time. Someone named this crazy spicing. Nose-clippng is much easier but less socially-acceptable.
Thanks to Phil Alexander.
You can do this at home with sodastream as well.
Seth, do you have a sense of how much (or how little) extra spice you need to add in order to fool your system? So if I eat a bowl of plain oatmeal every day, is it enough to top it with a sprinkle of random herb/spice from the pantry, or do I really need to spice the hell out of it to get the desired effect?
I tried fairly strong spicing with random garlic, ginger, and chili. That, I think, should be strong enough for anyone, but did not seem to work. Maybe one needs a wider variety of spices.
I suspect there’s individual variation– I’m moderately inclined to seek out new flavors, and they don’t make me eat less.
James, when I’ve done crazy spicing I used about six or seven spice blends (so that I wasn’t already familiar with them) and randomly put two of them on my food.
Alex, you need to add enough spice so that it gains a “ehh” (what is this?) taste. Hedonically neutral. “Is this food?” you should wonder. “It doesn’t taste like any food I’ve had before.”
I don’t understand how Coke has “just” come up with this. I mean didn’t everyone do this as a child. They were called Suicides… you mix any and all of the pops available in the fountain. This was in the late 80′s early 90′s and everyone I knew did this.
Ha, we called them Graveyards when I was a kid in the 80′s.
In college, it was called “purple Jesus punch”. Everyone was required to come to the party with a bottle of some random alcoholic beverage. All the bottles were dumped into a big plastic garbage can. When you drank the punch, your face turned purple, and you said, “Jesus!”.
I think you’d be amazed at how fast I can go from hedonically neutral to “hey, that’s kind of interesting”. Admittedly, my recent experience was with food which had been deliberately flavored in a Korean restaurant, but one of the side dishes definitely make a fast transition from weird to pleasant.