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  Steele also upped the price of Pepsi and adopted a new advertising theme, “More Bounce to the Ounce,” that emphasized Pepsi as a source of energy. It was a theme that plenty of soda companies had embraced before. From Coca-Cola’s wartime claims of productivity-boosting Coke breaks to Dr Pepper’s pseudoscientific “Drink a Bite to Eat at 10, 2 and 4” claim, soda companies had long pitched themselves as energy replenishing drinks. “More Bounce to the Ounce” tried to do the same, making a virtue of the sugar in Pepsi in TV advertising that showed teenagers doing the jitterbug while singing “Go get Pepsi for the Pepsi bounce” with a stunningly handsome first-time actor named James Dean at center stage. The ad launched Dean’s career, but the campaign failed.

  It turned out that postwar America didn’t want calories. American society was changing fast. The postwar economic boom led to an explosion in car ownership, and as Americans became motorists they left the inner cities and headed for the greenery, space, and peace of the suburbs. To supply their needs came new types of retail environments: shopping malls, supermarkets, drive-in movie theaters, fast-food chains, and gas stations—all offering convenience and copious parking. Main Street with its soda fountains and mom-and-pop stores was left behind as America headed for the highway. By the middle of the 1960s the once ubiquitous soda fountain was in steep decline. Before the war every small town had a soda fountain, but in 1965 only half of them did. In the cities the shift was even more marked. Drugstores dumped the fountains and new fast-food chains like McDonald’s nabbed their customers. The birthplace of the American soda industry turned into a relic, the fountains that survived becoming little more than museum pieces. The new American society was one of greater affluence, labor-saving devices, TV dinners, and extra leisure time. Yet it was also a society that constantly fretted about its weight even as its increasingly sedentary lifestyle increased its jean size.

  The idea that to be thin was to be beautiful took root in the 1920s and embedded itself deeper in people’s minds during the postwar years. This cultural shift in attitudes to attraction could be seen in the changing shape of Psyche, the topless mascot of the mineral water and soda company White Rock. In 1894 the Wisconsin company first adopted Psyche, a mortal of Greek legend who was so beautiful she made the goddess of love, Venus, jealous. Back then its vision of the legendary symbol of beauty had a five-foot-four frame and a 37-27-38 figure, but in 1947, to reflect changing attitudes, Psyche went on a crash diet, shedding two inches from her bust and waist plus a full three inches from her hips. She also grew a couple of inches taller. The trend would continue. By the end of the 1970s, White Rock’s Psyche had slimmed down to a twenty-four-inch waist and thirty-four-inch hips.

  Pepsi quickly realized that it had misjudged the national mood with its talk of extra calories and did a spectacular u-turn. “More Bounce to the Ounce” was out, replaced by “Pepsi-Cola, The Light Refreshment” in a campaign backed by newspaper ads aimed at weight-watching housewives that declared: “The modern woman owes a lot to today’s good sense in diet. She eats light, drinks light, and keeps her youthful figure longer. She looks better, feels better. Men like her better. And so does her insurance company. For her, today’s Pepsi-Cola is refreshment made to order.”

  This was Pepsi as a diet drink, not a calorie-packed soda. The trouble was that nothing had changed but the ads. After seeing Pepsi’s change in direction, Coca-Cola ordered its chemists to find out how the Pepsi formula had changed. The results were surprising. Pepsi’s formula hadn’t changed noticeably. In 1950 Coke’s chemists reported that Pepsi averaged 13.67 calories per ounce. In 1953 the newly christened light refreshment had an average of 13.41 calories in every ounce. Coca-Cola averaged 12.7 calories. One Coca-Cola employee tried to find out more by calling a local Pepsi bottler and pretending to be a fat man who hoped Pepsi might help him lose weight. The bottler cheerfully replied that there were just 10 calories per ounce in a Pepsi, providing a lower calorie count than Coca-Cola’s scientists were reporting and neatly fudging the fact that it came in twelve-ounce bottles.

  While Pepsi’s attempt to woo housewives by presenting itself as the lightweight option was largely smoke and mirrors, this and Steele’s other reforms did the trick, bringing the company back from the brink of ruin and transforming it, once again, into a fast-growing threat to Coca-Cola. By the middle of the 1950s Pepsi’s revival became threatening enough to finally persuade the increasingly conservative Woodruff that Coke would have to be sold in larger bottle sizes if the company was to win over supermarket shoppers looking to buy cola for their entire family. Soon soda companies were locked in a bottle size arms race to win over car-driving housewives who homed in on larger bottles that offered a lower price per ounce.

  But the concept of a diet soda was already becoming more than advertising fiction by the time Pepsi relaunched itself with its “Light Refreshment” campaign. Diet soda originated in 1951 when Hyman Kirsch became vice president of the Jewish Sanitarium for Chronic Disease in Brooklyn. Born in the Russian city of Simferopol in 1876, Kirsch moved to America sometime around 1900 and in 1904 founded Kirsch Beverages to produce a range of bottled sodas that included grape, lemon-lime, celery, and black cherry flavors. A year after taking the position at the sanitarium, Kirsch began thinking about how patients with diabetes or cardiovascular problems had to go without soda. He thought it was a shame that they couldn’t enjoy a refreshing drink of fizz, and together with his son Morris, he began looking into creating a sugar-free soda for them. The father-son duo asked Kirsch Beverages’ chemist Dr. Samuel Epstein to research the world of artificial sweeteners to see what sugar substitutes could be used.

  The best-known synthetic sweetener at that time was saccharin, discovered in 1879 by a German chemist who spilled some on his hands before tucking into a piece of bread only to find that it now tasted incredibly sweet. Although it was calorie-free, saccharin’s intense sweetness—about three hundred times that of sugar—also came with an unpleasant metallic aftertaste that was nearly impossible to conceal, so Epstein passed over saccharin and continued his search. One chemical laboratory he spoke to told him about a new form of artificial sweetener: cyclamates. Created at the University of Illinois in 1937, cyclamates could be used in two forms— sodium cyclamate and calcium cyclamate—but the result was the same: a sweetener thirty times as sweet as sugar, but with zero calories and a better taste than saccharin. And, in a fluke of timing, cyclamates had just been approved for use in food and drink.

  Using the new sweetener, Kirsch and his team developed two sugar-free sodas—a ginger ale and a black cherry flavor. They named the drinks No-Cal, and they proved popular with the sanitarium patients, but there weren’t enough patients to sustain production. So Kirsch decided to sell the range more widely and added root beer and chocolate soda flavors to it. Chocolate sodas had been a big fad in the soda fountains during the late nineteenth century, but while the rest of the United States had lost interest by the mid-1900s they remained popular in New York, especially in the form of the New York or Brooklyn egg cream, a frothy mix of soda water, milk, and chocolate syrup that contains neither egg nor cream. The drink’s roots are thought to lie in soda fountain egg creams or early chocolate milkshake recipes of the late 1800s, which often contained egg, cream, and soda water. In the 1920s cost-conscious New York fountain owners took out the egg and swapped cream for milk to save money. The result was the modern-day egg cream, a soda enduring enough among New Yorkers for Lou Reed to write a song about it for his 1996 album Set the Twilight Reeling.

  Armed with his new flavors, Kirsch started selling No-Cal in stores across the New York City area, pitching it as a sugar-free soda for weight-conscious women. By the end of 1953 Kirsch’s innovative diet sodas were racking up sales of more than $5 million a year, and No-Cal could be found in nearly three-quarters of New York grocery stores.

  It didn’t take long for other soda companies to latch onto the diet drink idea and start releasing their own sugar-free beverages, inc
luding Canada Dry, which launched a zero-calorie ginger ale called Glamor in 1954. By 1957 around 120 million bottles of diet soda were being sold in America every year. The wider diet industry wouldn’t take off until the 1960s but the soda companies were already laying the groundwork with their no-calorie sodas. Popular as these drinks were in the late 1950s they were but a drop in a soda ocean, but that was all about to change.

  In 1958 Royal Crown joined the diet pop bandwagon with Diet-Rite. Initially the company promoted it as a drink for diabetics and sold it in the medical section of drugstores. But in 1961 the company decided to see if it could break Diet-Rite out of its diabetic niche by launching it in Chicago’s supermarkets and promoting it as a cola with all the taste but none of the calories. It was a decision that sparked a revolution.

  Diet-Rite’s new visibility and sales appeal hit the spot with weight-watching Chicagoans, and the following year Royal Crown launched it in stores across America where it was an instant success. Pepsi and Coca-Cola were caught napping. Diet-Rite’s national breakthrough made sugar-free soda a big deal. Coke and Pepsi rushed to bring out their own diet drinks. After being warned by its lawyers that calling its sugar-free cola Diet Coca-Cola could undermine the company’s valuable trademark, Coke programmed an IBM 1401 computer to spew out a list of 250,000 three- and four-letter words that the company then whittled down to Tab, the diet cola it introduced in April 1963. That same year Pepsi, clearly getting the same advice from its lawyers, launched Patio Diet Cola, only to ignore its lawyers and change the drink’s name to Diet Pepsi a year later. Dr Pepper launched Dietetic Dr Pepper before dumping the medical name and opting for Sugar-Free Dr Pepper instead. In 1966 Coke came out with a second diet drink, the citrus-flavored Fresca. Even 7Up, which initially refused point blank to release a diet drink due to its concerns about taste, eventually caved.

  In 1965 Americans were drinking ten million pounds of cyclamates and two million pounds of saccharin every year through diet soda, which now accounted for 15 percent of the entire carbonated soft drink market. A liquid reflection of the rise of diet culture, the sugar-free soda boom of the 1960s made the growth of energy drinks in the late 1990s and early 2000s look like nothing more than a ripple in an ocean. Soda, it seemed, was getting healthy, and Royal Crown’s Diet-Rite had fended off Coke and Pepsi to remain the leader of the pack.

  The rise of the diet sodas shocked the sugar industry. In just three years diet soda had gone from a mere sliver to a chunky wedge of the carbonated soft drinks industry, drawing people away from sugar and toward artificial sweeteners. Soda was big, big business for the sugar producers, and the trend worried them. Artificial sweeteners were cheaper than sugar and less prone to supply shortages, so the soda companies stood to make more money from selling diet drinks than their regular sugar-based fizz. What, the sugar industry wondered, if the growth of diet beverages didn’t stop? What if sugared soda became the niche and diet soda the norm? Could the future be sugar free? The sugar industry figured that if that was the future, it’d be damned if it was going to let that happen. As John Hickson, the vice president of the International Sugar Research Foundation, told the New York Times in 1969: “A dollar’s worth of sugar could be replaced with a dime’s worth of [cyclamate]. If anyone can undersell you nine cents out of 10 you’d better find some brickbat you can throw at him.”

  Big Sugar found its brickbat sitting in the law books. Back in 1958 a New York congressman named James Delaney chaired an investigation into the use of chemicals and insecticides in food and drink. The Democratic representative used the probe to introduce an amendment to the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act that was designed to protect the public from dangerous carcinogens. The measure, known as the Delaney Clause, required the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to ban the use of chemical additives that had been found “to induce cancer in man, or, after tests, found to induce cancer in animals.”

  By the time the diet soda boom took off, the Delaney Clause had already rocked the root beer industry to its very foundations. In December 1960 the FDA ordered safrole, the oil of sassafras, to be removed from all food and drink after it was deemed a carcinogen. Safrole had been a core ingredient of root beer for more than a century and now, suddenly, it was gone, and much of root beer’s flavor with it. For a drink that had been losing ground to cola, ginger ale, and lemon-lime sodas for years, this very public cancer scare, coupled with the resulting taste change, smacked root beer even further down from its temperance heyday. Root beer eventually staged a minor recovery in the mid-1960s after developing a process for purging the safrole from its ingredients, but the incident almost killed the drink.

  The root beer crisis provided a clear demonstration of the power of the Delaney Clause. The sugar industry reasoned that establishing a link between cyclamates and cancer would be the perfect way to snuff out diet soda. So it flung money at studies of the artificial sweetener in the hope of finding something—anything—it could use to invoke the Delaney Clause. In 1969 the sugar industry’s $600,000 investment in cyclamate studies hit pay dirt when scientists at Abbott Laboratories plied rats with the sweetener for eighteen months and reported that the rodents had developed cancerous bladder tumors. Big Sugar had found its silver bullet. That the unfortunate rats were pumped with so much cyclamate that a human would need to gulp down more than five hundred Frescas a day to consume an equivalent amount didn’t matter. The Delaney Clause might have been well meaning but it was ineptly drafted, making no distinction for potency or risk. If a substance could cause cancer even in unrealistically extreme circumstances, that was enough to invoke a ban.

  On learning of the test results, the FDA slapped a ban on cyclamates effective from October 19, 1969. Britain, Finland, and Sweden followed with bans of their own. The resulting cancer scare destroyed the diet soda boom. Coke, Pepsi, Royal Crown, and others were quick to reformulate their diet drinks with less tasty saccharin or a more calorific sugar-saccharin mix, but the damage had been done. Before the ban, diet soda accounted for 19 percent of fizzy drink sales in America. In the wake of the cyclamate ban, diet soda’s share of the business collapsed to just 3 percent. Royal Crown watched sales of its Coke- and Pepsi-beating diet drink evaporate.

  Subsequent studies would clear cyclamates of their cancer connection, and it remains in use in some parts of the world, but in America the sweetener that sparked the creation of diet soda was gone. The cyclamate ban was just the first hit. In early 1970 another study funded by the Sugar Research Foundation came out, this time linking saccharin to bladder tumors in rats, raising the prospect of a ban of the last remaining artificial sweetener approved for use in food and drink. Again the tests involved rats consuming saccharin at levels that would be equivalent to a human guzzling their way through eight hundred diet sodas a day, but the Delaney Clause didn’t deal in gray: substances either caused cancer or they didn’t in its world.

  Panicked by the prospect of a ban that would effectively abolish diet soda altogether, Coca-Cola chief executive Paul Austin wrote to Robert Finch, the US secretary of health, education and welfare, in April 1970 to plead with him not to ban saccharin. “Action affecting the use of saccharin along the lines of that taken with respect to cyclamate will have implications for this industry far exceeding those which accompanied the cyclamate ban,” wrote Austin. “Consumers also have a vital interest in the continued availability of artificially sweetened soft drinks. To deprive diabetics or those with a need to control their caloric intake of a supply of refreshing beverages in the absence of scientifically compelling reasons would be highly prejudicial to that consumer interest.”

  Finch was sympathetic—he felt the Delaney Clause was too extreme and harbored doubts about whether cyclamates should have been banned— but the law was the law. So he engineered a compromise: saccharin would remain on the market but the levels of the sweetener in any product would be restricted and diet soda would need to carry the warning: “Use of this product may be hazardous to your health. This pr
oduct contains saccharin, which has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.”

  The soda industry’s fight to save saccharin continued throughout the 1970s. The Sugar Research Foundation continued to bankroll studies linking it to cancer while the beverage industry managed to get Congress to keep delaying the imposition of a ban while it waited for aspartame, a new artificial sweetener, to get approval for human consumption, which it finally got in 1981. The fight over saccharin eventually ended in 2000 when it was discovered that it caused cancer in rats due to a toxicological mechanism that didn’t exist in humans. With this finding and a lack of conclusive evidence that saccharin caused cancer in humans, the restrictions were lifted and the warning labels introduced in the early 1970s were finally removed. By then the impractical Delaney Clause was gone as well, reformed in 1996 so that future bans would depend on the level of risk posed by a carcinogen rather than its mere presence.

  By the time the sugar producers began their assault on saccharin, however, soda had another enemy. At 1:30 PM on April 22, 1970, a group of hippies and students gathered at Atlanta’s Piedmont Park to mark the first ever Earth Day. They had come together at the urging of the Great Speckled Bird, the city’s weekly countercultural newspaper, and their target was Coca-Cola. In the weeks leading up to the protest, the radical newspaper had called on “ecology freaks, fed up with litter and mountains of undegradable solid waste” to bring empty cans and bottles of Coke, Fresca, Tab, Sprite, and Fanta with them to dump outside the beverage giant’s headquarters. “Bring more than you can carry,” the paper told its twenty-two thousand readers. “Bring the trash home to the people who make it.” After loading a pickup with piles of branded flotsam and jetsam, the protestors took their convoy of garbage through the streets of Atlanta. After a three-mile trek to the Coca-Cola headquarters on North Avenue they dumped the mounds of bottles and cans outside the entrance and, having displayed their displeasure at the company’s throwaway containers, walked away, leaving Coke to clean up the mess.