Abba Zabba

If you haven't looked closely at the juice aisle in the supermarket, you might assume there is no such thing. You might assume that since juice is made entirely from fruit, it must be healthy, and doesn't need a diet version. You might also assume that, since there's no such thing as a diet fruit, there's no such thing as diet juice either. But you'd be wrong. Because diet juice is very real.

Diet juice is also disgusting. I accidentally bought some the other day. It's right next to the regular juice, with a very similar label. I just missed the word "Light". So this morning I poured myself a glass of what I thought was Cranberry-Grape juice, but was actually Light Cranberry-Grape juice cocktail. Basically, it tasted like grape Kool-Aid. It was so sweet that it made my teeth hurt. I could barely finish the first sip.

Diet juice is also expensive. It cost $3.50 for a bottle, the same as regular juice. (And a lot more than the Kool-Aid it resembled.) I'm willing to pay extra for 100% juice, because it's made from real ingredients that aren't cheap. But this was only 22% juice. The rest was water and Splenda. So why does it cost the same as the real thing? Because Big Juice knows that anyone who's enough of a sucker to buy reduced-calorie juice on purpose is enough of a sucker to pay extra for the privilege of having their juice watered down and sweetened.

I'm waiting for the day when people realize they can just eat less of a particular food, instead of buying the reduced-calorie version of it. Then the diet food industry will collapse entirely. I think I'll be waiting for a long, long time.