One Unpleasant Chubby

I like trying new things.

I’m an adventurous eater and I never back away from something different. When I was younger, my whole family and I used to trek to an annual game feast at a local restaurant for about ten years, through the course of which I tried, amongst others: boar, frog, turtle, bear, camel, snake, alligator, beaver, and more … That’s a bit of a digression, but the point is, I like to try new things.

Friday night, I found myself at the local Star Market (because that is the kind of sexy activity I tend to do on Friday nights). My Star Market has a fancy “foods of the world” section, mostly full of crappy MSG-laden Asian and Mexican ingredients. As I was browsing through it, something caught my eye — a rack full of tiny bottles of soda. It was Chubby brand soda (go ahead and have fun with the name, you can get a lot of traction out of it, believe me) from Trinidad and Tobago. What really caught my eye was that one of the flavors was banana. Banana soda?!? How could I pass this up? The answer is that I could not. I finished my shopping and hurried home, excited to get that Chubby (soda) in my mouth!

I cracked open the little bottle and poured it over some ice. The first sign that something was up hit me; there was virtually no carbonation in this so-called soda. The smell was slightly nauseating, akin to twenty or thirty banana scratch-and-sniff stickers. Did that deter me from taking care of my chubby? Hells to the no!

Now, let me, dear reader, try to describe what drinking this “soda” was like. It was as if someone poured corn syrup into a glass of kool-aid that was inexplicably flavored with fake bananas. It was downright viscous and completely devoid of any carbonation; it was some cruel kind of banana excrement. It was syrupy nastiness in a bottle. It was the work of some evil banana-demon. It was unholy. In a word, it was gross. Much worse than the beaver, trust me…