Day Soda #16: Surfing the K-Wave
Plus: Good Reads
En route to Madrid last month, I started reading Nuclear War: A Scenario, a self-described “non-fiction thriller” that imagines, in intricate detail, what would happen if nuclear war were to break out today.
In the scenario, war begins when North Korea surprise attacks the United States with an ICBM. These are not your grandfather’s nuclear weapons, not the relatively puny warheads depicted in last summer’s Oppenheimer. These are weapons capable of liquidating entire metropolitan areas, and there are thousands of them around the globe ready to fire at any given moment.
All it takes is one missile—possibly stuffed with multiple warheads, mind you, able to independently hit separate targets—to set off a chain of events that dooms the entire world to a nuclear holocaust in less than the time it takes to watch your average summer blockbuster. It took me longer to read the scenario than it would take to live the scenario.
Until that occurs, we have Coca-Cola K-Wave. I found a can of it in a supermarket in Madrid and knew that I had to try it. Introduced as part of the same “Creations” line that also brought us Coca-Cola Dreamworld and Coca-Cola Ultimate, K-Wave is supposed to taste like K-Pop.
You might be wondering—what does K-Pop taste like? I don’t know, and drinking a full can of Coca-Cola K-Wave didn’t bring any closer to understanding. Coca-Cola describes K-Wave as being “fruity fantasy flavored.” I would describe it as a workplace accident where a retro baseball card collector accidentally tipped a pack of old Topps cards—bubblegum included—into an open vat of Coke Zero, where they were left to ferment into a sickly sweet concoction.
What did South Korea do to deserve Coca-Cola K-Wave? The US military is supposed to protect South Korea on the world stage. How could they let Coca-Cola do this? Combined with what I’ve read in Nuclear War: A Scenario, I’m increasingly concerned that our ability to stave off both total nuclear annihilation and gross soda flavors is greatly diminished.
