It's the real thing

This fall, Nation Books will be publishing the US edition of Belching out the Devil: Global Adventures with Coca-Cola, by Mark Thomas, a lively expose of the world's favorite soft drink. (The title, by the way, comes from a religious ceremony that Mr. Thomas discovers in Chiapas; Mayan peasants there turned to Coke to expel demons because it's cheaper than the local product they had previously used.) It looks like fun. (More details to come; in the mean time, you can catch the author discussing his book in this bit from BBC Two's The Culture Show.)

It was brought to mind by this crazy story heard today on PRI's The World -- in Ethiopia, a shortage of Coca-Cola is being called a national emergency. Get this: the global economic meltdown has made it impossible for Ethiopian bottling plants to import caps; consequently, they can no longer bottle and distribute everyone's favorite soft drink. And this is a real crisis. Elizabeth Blunt of the BBC says that "every tiny village with a tiny village shop, the one thing you can nearly always get is Coca-Cola." That evinces a huge distribution network, one that provides employment and wages for an estimated 150,000 people in Ethiopia alone. What a world we live in....