Wednesday, May 17, 2006

An Insane Question

When popping open my can of lemonade this morning - suddenly a weird thought came into my mind. A lemonade is a lemonade because it has lemon flavour - even if its not natural lemon. Now consider a scenario where by some accident we never had lemon in nature. Then we would not have known how a lemon tastes. Would we still have lemonade then - I mean the flavour - by some other name?

Searching for flavors not directly inspired by natural ingredients - the most common example I came across is cola - be it Coke or Pepsi. I don't not know if "sweetness" is a flavour - but if its not - then the whole gamut of Sprite to 7 Up to Mountain Dew wont count. All the others I see are inspired by natural ones. So the question boils down to whether we would have discovered the "lemon taste". Chemically that's citric acid - so would we have tasted citric acid from some other non edible natural source? Or accidentally synthesized it and ended up tasting it?

Ponder over that over a glass of lemonade!

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