Amongst those bee keepers and bacon curers and renegades of raw-milk cheese on hand at the Mother Earth News Fair a week ago were a few purveyors of actual manufactured food.  Amongst these was Begley’s and Bill’s, an all natural soda company owned by Ed Begley, Jr., that most famous of Spinal Tap drummers and a long-term and pleasingly unassuming environmentalist.

Begley’s sodas are not only all natural (a term not regulated by the FDA), but calorie free (a term which is).  Or, to be more precise, they have 0.2 kilocalories per gram which is the same, as far as the FDA is concerned, as calorie free.

I am not a soda guy.  I haven’t had a Coke in years and only occasionally mix ginger ale in a drink.  Our favorite Chinese delivery place (J’s Wong, here’s to ya) continues to bring us cans of Pepsi and they are lined up like soldiers beside the sink, waiting to see which of my impulses—(a) to not waste and thus put them on the stoop for passersby or (b) to do the world a favor and pour them down the drain—will win out.

And I think artificial sweeteners are poison hand’s down.  After all, what foodstuffs taste like poison until you ingrest them enough to become inured?  Other than Aspartame and its cohorts, the thing that springs to mind is whiskey.  I like whiskey.  But I’m under no illusions.

So I was interested in checking out Begley’s soda.  I bought a four-pack that included root beer, ginger ale, strawberry, and banana’s foster.  That’s right.  Whomever thought of that last as a soda flavor was a genius.

But first, let’s address the zero calorie thing. Continue reading →