(“Sweet Nothing—The Triumph Of Diet Soda,” American Heritage Magazine, June/July 2006 — by Benjamin Siegel)
It came out of a Brooklyn hospital and in very few years changed not only what Americans drink but how they see themselves.
It is probably fair to say that hyman kirsch, 50 years dead, his once powerful beverage company now a shadow of its former fizzy self, could not have imagined the ways in which his No-Cal soda would change the world. Kirsch was gone before Diet Coke hit supermarket shelves everywhere; he never heard “Tab, Tab cola, for beautiful people� or drank a diet soda “just for the taste of it.� But his legacy is a multibillion-dollar-a-year business and has created a nation full of consumers thirsty for the latest liquid nothing.
