I’m not really a junk food guy, but I am a weird food guy.  And by weird I don’t just mean bizarre (like that pregnant mud eel that Shannon made me eat at a Cambodian “air force” base) but also novel, cute, odd, etc.  Maybe my first exposure to weird junk food was through my old man, who still to this day will bi-annually rock a Moon Pie.  Moon Pies, in case you are unaware, are two pieces of cardboard stuffed with low-grade putty and shellacked in plastic.  Now, even though I know these taste like wood and petroleum products, I inevitably eat one if it’s presented to me sufficiently long after my last taste.  The fact that these things are still actually produced and actually purchased for consumption is just too nonsensical for me to ignore.

It's Country Club brand, so I knew it would be refined.

Less nonsensical but equally novel and compelling are what I am going to label here as Hispanic sodas. Jarrito is one brand you may have seen.  Its different flavors are different Lifesaver colors.  New York has a fantastic collections of these sodas, and a specimen I’d never seen before, one from the Dominican Republic, caught my eye the other say.

That’s right, that’s meringue flavored soda.  And the spokescharacter, is that a drop of soda giving the thumbs-up within a different drop of soda?  I’m pretty sure it is.  How am I going to say no to that?

So I pony’d up two-twenty-five (?!) for this bottle of Country Club and twisted off the top.

Sweet Jesus. 

It tasted like a liquid Dum Dum lollipop, which is far, far less tasty than it sounds.  The meringue flavor itself was sort of a mutant cream soda, recognizable but overgrown to Godzilla proportions.  It did not taste like meringue.  It almost didn’t take like sugar.  It tasted like “sweet” turned up to eleven.  Perhaps that’s because, I noticed after my teeth stopped quivering in my gums, the bottle had 47 grams of sugar.  That’s eight more than Coke.  And that was more or less my soda intake for the remainder of 2013.