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What Coke Contains

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Re: What Coke Contains

#121

Post by Uncompetative »

"The second ingredient, caramel coloring, gives the drink its distinctive dark brown color. There are four types of caramel coloring — Coca Cola uses type E150d, which is made by heating sugars with sulfite and ammonia to create bitter brown liquid. The syrup’s other principal ingredient is phosphoric acid, which adds acidity and is made by diluting burnt phosphorus (made by heating phosphate rock in an arc-furnace) and processing it to remove arsenic."

Hmmm... arsenic

I'd rather there were no lethal poisons at any point in the production process.

I'm never drinking another glass of Coca-Cola. I'm not touching PEPSI either.

Re: What Coke Contains

#123

Post by maxerickson »

jacquesm wrote: post #117
aneth4 wrote: post #111

The most interesting part of the story lies here: "coca-leaf which comes from South America and is processed in a unique US government authorized factory in New Jersey to remove its addictive stimulant cocaine" Consider the implications of one of the largest American companies being singularly authorized to buy and import hundreds of tons of coca leaf, which is banned in nearly every country and produced primarily by…

Where does pepsi get theirs?

They don't.

Re: What Coke Contains

#124

Post by praxeologist »

vacri wrote: post #107
jacques_chester wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's a leading question. From the other side of the debate I'd attack the concept of subjective value. Why do people value this? We don't know. They just do. How do you know they value it? Because of their actions. Why do they take those actions? Because of their valuations. But it's also difficult to argue the counter-case. Outside of corner cases such as depression, psychotic episodes etc, if people aren't act…

The problem with this argument is it's too simplistic. When you respond with "people will sometimes do things against their best interests out of a sense of duty", the counter is to reduce the human to a stimulus-response box and say "aha! but they must be doing that because it benefits some psychological issue, so it is increasing their happiness" The issue comes when that extremely mangled definition of happiness i…

Isn't a person acting to fulfill one's duty something they do because they feel it is in their best interest? I would not be using the term "happiness", rather say that a person acts to remove a felt uneasiness.

How do you define "happiness"? What do you propose as an alternative to the subjective theory of value? (edit: if you disagree with it, I noticed it was the other guy hinting at being against it.)

Re: What Coke Contains

#125

Post by iso-8859-1 »

Uncompetative wrote: post #121

"The second ingredient, caramel coloring, gives the drink its distinctive dark brown color. There are four types of caramel coloring — Coca Cola uses type E150d, which is made by heating sugars with sulfite and ammonia to create bitter brown liquid. The syrup’s other principal ingredient is phosphoric acid, which adds acidity and is made by diluting burnt phosphorus (made by heating phosphate rock in an arc-furnace)…

There's a lot of stuff you can't ingest, if you'd follow that criterion.

Re: What Coke Contains

#126

Post by rm999 »

aneth4 wrote: post #111

The most interesting part of the story lies here: "coca-leaf which comes from South America and is processed in a unique US government authorized factory in New Jersey to remove its addictive stimulant cocaine" Consider the implications of one of the largest American companies being singularly authorized to buy and import hundreds of tons of coca leaf, which is banned in nearly every country and produced primarily by…

Here's an article on that topic and some excerpts I thought were interesting http://www.uic.edu/classes/osci/osci590/9_3%20The%20Legal%20...

>The Stepan Company (a $400 million American Stock Exchange company) of Maywood, New Jersey imports 175,000 KG of coca leaves into the United States each year. The leaves come from some of the same farms that supply the Columbian drug cartels.

>Flavor scientists say that the mysterious essence has no significant taste of its own , but acts as an 'enhancer' PepsiCo Inc. does not use the coca leaf. Flavor scientist Nicholas Feurstein thinks that the average guzzler might well notice the difference if Coke stopped using it.

>The leaf is ground up, mixed with sawdust, soaked in bicarbonate of soda, percolated with toluene, steam blasted, mixed with powdered Kola nuts, and then pasteurized. The Coke-Cola company, forever fearful of the DEA and the drug lords, is a stickler on security and quality. Drug lords have a less formal way to extract cocaine: they use kerosene as a solvent; the drug leaches out like tea from a tea bag. Cocaine is then recovered by evaporation.

Re: What Coke Contains

#127

Post by goostavos »

triplesec wrote: post #93

This sounds something like an astroturf for a brown chemical drink which sure as eggs is eggs will rot your teeth and kill you sooner than if you drink clean water (or moderate amounts of wine for that matter). We can make the globalisation and connectedness point a lot more clearly and ideologically neutrally without promoting useless Lowest Common Denominator products that merely waste our resources and do not add…

>This sounds something like an astroturf for a brown chemical drink which sure as eggs is eggs will rot your teeth and kill you sooner than if you drink clean water (or moderate amounts of wine for that matter).

...Did you just make that up on the spot?

>We can make the globalisation and connectedness point a lot more clearly and ideologically neutrally without promoting useless Lowest Common Denominator products that merely waste our resources and do not add to the total sum of human happiness.

Oh, good grief, I responded to your exact type of comment by another person further down, but I'll repeat the summary here: Your comment makes no sense.

I don't know if you're just the type of guy that needs to cut down everything to justify your ego, or maybe this is just a form of the engineer humble brag, but honestly, "Lowest Common Denominator products that merely waste our resources and do not add to the total sum of human happiness." Really? You going to stand by that? Did you even read the article?

I'd say the fact that it requires all of the distribution and production means describes in the article to keep up the demand of its product a tick in the "Brings Happiness" column. I myself very much enjoy having a Cherry Coke Zero when anytime I visit the theater. Have I, along with the rest of the world, been deluding myself? I didn't actually enjoy that product, and got no happiness or enjoyment out of its consumption? Who knew!

Further human happiness is a strange thing to use as a measuring stick for a product's "worth." What is the 'level' of human happiness that a product must bring before it is of value in your book? Obviously, being that coca-cola product represent 3% of all beverages consumed around the world (I looked it up), we need something that, what, hits that 4% mark before we can acknowledge that it actually does deliver some marginal level of happiness to the population?

What is your opinion on restaurants? Those seem to provide the same type of happiness as a coke. Maybe we should tell all those people to go out and do something worthwhile that gives actual happiness. Whatever that fuck that actually means.

Re: What Coke Contains

#130

Post by davidtanner »

rm999 wrote: post #126
aneth4 wrote: post #111

The most interesting part of the story lies here: "coca-leaf which comes from South America and is processed in a unique US government authorized factory in New Jersey to remove its addictive stimulant cocaine" Consider the implications of one of the largest American companies being singularly authorized to buy and import hundreds of tons of coca leaf, which is banned in nearly every country and produced primarily by…

Here's an article on that topic and some excerpts I thought were interesting http://www.uic.edu/classes/osci/osci590/9_3%20The%20Legal%20... >The Stepan Company (a $400 million American Stock Exchange company) of Maywood, New Jersey imports 175,000 KG of coca leaves into the United States each year. The leaves come from some of the same farms that supply the Columbian drug cartels. >Flavor scientists say that the mys…

From what I recall, a non polar solvent such as kerosene is used in the crude extraction of cocaine. However, it's very very unlikely that "cocaine is then recovered by evaporation" since kerosene is obtained by the fractional distillation of crude oil starting at 150C. Even if it were possible to evaporate off the kerosene to obtain freebase cocaine it would be amazingly dangerous.

The actual cocaine refining process, I believe, is a fairly typical polar/non-polar acid/base extraction.

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