Dear Mr. Seven

In this debased age we find ourselves in, it is perhaps expected that you, staid and boring as you are, would eventually glom onto the newest trend in carbonated hummingbird food and make some outlandish, unnecessary flavor of your soda. In fact, once your colleague Mr. Pepper decided to do the absolutely unneedful and make his weird and terrible Strawberries and Cream soda, it was perhaps inevitable that you’d jump on the artificially flavored bandwagon and schlock out some terrible flavor of your soda.

And so, of course, that’s exactly what you did. I was at my local greengrocer’s the other day, Mr. Meyer’s, and what should I find but a 12-pack of “Tropical 7-Up.” A twelve-pack of full-size, twelve ounce cans. You didn’t even do us the courtesy of making this vile creation of terrible alchemical knowledge available to us in a tiny-can eight pack, or even an honest six-pack, or best of all, a single twenty-ounce bottle. No, no you did not. You made a terrible flavor of your sugar water available to us and then just straight dared us to commit to an entire fridge-pack of soda, water, and flavors that Man Was Not Meant To Ken.

I am so tired.

But, like a heroine in a Harlequin Romance, I was drawn as a moth to a flame to the crappy orange packaging sitting on the endcap of the grocer’s aisles, and I knew I had to buy a pack and try it. Why, you might ask? Because there’s a godsdamn PEACH on the packaging.

Sir, have you ever seen fruit? Are you aware of what a fruit is? I assume that you get all your “fruits” and “vegetables” from fruit-and-veg pills sold by hucksters on Mr. Fox’s terrible television station. I assume you have never seen a tree. I assume you, sir, have imprisoned your entire marketing department in an underground bunker where they are grown in vats and never allowed to see the outside world, never allowed to see the sun or the hills or a tree. I assume you saw that Apple TV show Silo and decided “you know what lets do this thing” because, sir, there are many fruits, and there are many ways to describe them, but no one, absolutely no one, would ever, ever, in the history of ever, describe a peach as “tropical.”

Sir. Most peach varieties require at least EIGHT HUNDRED hours of chill time each year if they’re going to set fruit. EIGHT HUNDRED. Do you know what one, minor, tiny, defining characteristic of tropical regions is? No? Well, here’s a hint - they. don’t. freeze. “Pip pip cheerio old fellows, make sure you bring your anoraks and skiing gear for our tropical holidays in the Maldives” said no British guv’nor ever. “Do you like tropical apples? I got a number. How ‘bout them tropical apples?” said no Masshole ever (including but not limited to Matt Damon). The best peaches I’ve personally ever eaten were grown on the Western Slope of Colorado, where winter lows are typically around zero degrees fahrenheit, the record low is a whopping negative twenty-three fahrenheit, and typically gets an average of 19.1 inches of snow each and every winter. I was snowed on in the Western Slope in October last year, for crying out loud. No one would ever, ever describe Grand Junction as tropical and yet they grow the best peaches I’ve ever eaten! Peaches! They’re just not tropical fruits! What the hell is wrong with you!
(You, sir, might say to me at this point: Alex. That’s not a peach on the label. That’s a nectarine. Get it straight. You know what? That’s fine. Scan this letter into your computer, run OCR on it, and then do a search-and-replace on that last paragraph for “peach” and replace it with “nectarine.” I stand by the paragraph regardless. Nothing functional will change.)

I’ll let the mango on the can slide. Mangos are tropical. Fine. Doesn’t make your can design, marketing department, flavor scientists, and copywriters any less wrong or lazy.

But you know what? Maybe this is your goal. Maybe you’re looking to just destroy the language further, sir. Why not attach made-up meanings to words, right? All words are just made-up anyway! In that spirit, and since your marketing department made a tremendously cowardly choice in picking the blandest fruit possible to misattribute as “tropical,” let me right here and now present to you a list of much more interesting plant flavored 7-Ups you and your team of Mr. Dew’s rejects can make and market to an increasingly jaded audience:

• 7-Up Tropical Swedish Lingonberry 
• 7-Up Tropical Good King Henry 
• 7-Up Tropical Juniper Berry Blast
• 7-Up Tropical Icelandic Moss Madness
• 7-Up Tropical Arctic Ice (I don’t know what this would taste like but you can come up with something I’m sure, sir.)
• 7-Up Tropical Medlar Breeze
• 7-Up Tropical Greengage Pudding
• 7-Up Tropical Rhubarb Spring

I expect to see all of these on Mr. Meyer’s shelves posthaste, sir.

Eventually, sir, I got home, and stuck a couple cans out of the giant frickin’ package in the fridge to cool down, and then I was finally able to give this beverage a try. I’m not sure what I expected it to taste like – well, aside from peaches – but never in a million years did I expect it to taste like what it does: thin, carbonated, Sunny D. Has Mr. Sunny reached out to you yet, sir? This is a beverage for children who think they’re sophisticated, much like Sunny D itself. There are hints of oranges, tangerines, peaches, mangoes… in the same way that a child’s drawing of a house is an architectural blueprint. If I was to give this beverage any credit, any at all, it’s that at least it’s less sickeningly sweet than Sunny D (and yes, I would rather drink the “purple stuff” than Sunny D, even under my working assumption that the “purple stuff” is all-purpose cleaner).

But as I drank more and more of the can, it became clear why you didn’t use the Cool Spot in any of the packaging or marketing for this soda - it’s no better or worse than any other soda, really, but there’s something fundamentally uncool about this soda. Beyonce will never be seen drinking this onstage. Ye will never be seen with a glass filled with ice and this pinkish-orange quaff. Post Malone wouldn’t be caught dead. This is a fine and unimaginative but fundamentally fuddy-duddy beverage. Frankly, I’m surprised you put your good name on it, Mr. Seven. Maybe you’re just hoping you’ll find a recipe for a 7-Up Tropical Upside Down Cake in a church cookbook at a yard sale twenty years hence. It’s almost a foregone conclusion someone in Iowa will make and publish such a thing, and that that single entry by Mrs. Mason in the Britt First Methodist Country Cooking Almanac 2023 will the be the only cultural impact Tropical 7-Up makes.

For now, I will continue looking forward to seeing what other flavors your cowardly marketing department decides are tropical. I look forward to corresponding with you further when I find cans of 7-Up Tropical Mire Poix on Mr. Meyer’s shelves in what I am sure will be just a few short weeks.

Sincerely,

Alex Parise