Diabolo Ginger

Diabolo Ginger. A sort of Deleuzian soda for a public trying to find some engagement with commerce. Like all such products, manufactured from fragments of the imagination. A bit here. A bit there. The final conclusion, specious at best, baldly manipulative and misinforming at its heart. Here's a soda, manufactured under the rubric of its Sekai no Kitchen (世界のKitchen) - the "world kitchen" line of soft drinks. It's important to note that the very name of this product is written with Japanese kanji and English orthography, hinting at an almost Hegelian synthesis of meaning. In this promotion, Hungarian grandmothers make yogurt drinks with mangoes and the old ladies of Provence boil down ginger, spices and grapefruits, mix them with soda to make this new-fangled ginger ale. Diabolo - a French slang that sounds almost Spanish - used mainly for describing soda drinks made with either mint, grenadine or raspberries - and Ginger (again in English, not in French) are the exact words they use to describe this thing. This thing, where exactly is it from? This thing springs from the imagination of those food scientists at Kirin, that they market as something traditional, yet not, something ultimately fictive. Do you buy this fiction? Do you buy the story it tells?

It's actually a rather nice ginger ale. Certainly better than the Schweppes or Canada Dry or Wilkeson products that in their pure artificiality signify "ginger ale," rather than actually taste like ginger ale. Which brings up a certain conundrum around the nexus of the taste imprinted on the imagination vs. the actual taste of things. If you expect the taste of ginger to be what's in your basic commercial ginger ale, what happens when you taste real ginger? Which is why Diabolo Ginger, which tastes like the more artisanal and real ginger sodas that began hitting the US market about 15 or 20 years ago, will probably always live in some niche market. It just doesn't taste like ginger ale. Even though, objectively, it tastes better. And what does Provence have to do with it anyway? Nothing, if you're being objective. And as a postmodern marketing strategy it's totally laughable. Choose your Deleuzion.