2228 Fire-ade

You'll be happy to hear that a consumer petition can do something. Not necessarily a boycott, but a well-crafted petition imploring a company to change something for the better. We hope.

The story has to do with fire retardant in a Coke product. The sports drink Powerade. Talk about quenching your thirst. 

In any event, a petition started by Mississippi teenager Sarah Kavanagh got the ball rolling, or opened a can of worms, or whatever. She set it up through Change.org and got 50,000 signatures. Her petition was actually aimed at Pepsi, who put fire retardant in Gatorade. After the petition, they stopped doing so. Now Coke is saying they'll knock off the same good deed with knock-off Powerade.

The fire retardant that everyone is referring to, by the way, is actually just an ingredient used in fire retardant, brominated vegetable oil. It's used to keep some ingredients in suspension in the drink, so it doesn't separate into different components and layers and require the old "shake before use" admonition. Because, you know, we'd rather poison ourselves than exert a little extra effort before we drink our SPORTS drink. 

Coke says it is adding another ingredient to save us the effort since the fire retardant chemical is no longer being used. The new ingredient? Glycerol ester of rosin. 

So it's kind of a good news/bad news deal. Good news, if for some reason you need to improve your grip when on the pitcher's mound or vaulting horse, you got your rosin bag built right into your sports drink. Just pour. Instant sticky.

But on the bad news side, us terminal worrywarts will worry ourselves sick that our Powerade or Gatorade will burst into flame. 

Maybe we can petition to change it back.  

America, ya gotta love it.