Soda

Soda history is a fascinating love affair between entrepreneurs, scientists and the American consumer. Originally touted as health-enhancing beverages capable of curing everything from tuberculosis to hair loss, the first sodas contained what pharmacists called nervines, which could have included varying amounts of cannabis, opium, morphine, cocaine and even strychnine. Wildly popular in the late 19th century, soda fountains sprang up all over the U.S., providing these healthy, energizing drinks to customers who thoroughly enjoyed the way these medicinal beverages made them feel.

The ‘90s were saturated with oddball Nickelodeon characters – Rugrats, Ren and Stimpy, Doug – noisy with the sound of raw guitar-heavy, grunge bands like Nirvana and Pearl Jam, and suffered an invasion of weird-looking, Japanese pocket monsters called Pokémon. The pre-Internet, post-hair band decade of the 1990s also gave us a multitude of tasty and not so tasty beverages we still drink, dream about or recoil at the thought of drinking again.

If you live in the Northeast, you call it soda. If you reside in the Midwest, it’s pop. From the South? You call all carbonated beverages coke. No matter what you call it, your carbonated beverage fix probably comes from either Coca-Cola or Pepsi or one of the many variations of those classic brands.