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The Monterrey Challenge

February 22, 2009 | posted by Lars under mexico, updates

Don’t worry, this challenge doesn’t have to do with tenting in the second largest metropolitan area in Mexico or punishing ascents into the mountains of the country’s interior.  We were well cared for in Monterrey, and the climbing, while more than we had experience to that point in the trip, wasn’t terrible.  It relates to a statistic we learned from our hosts in Monterrey, and an attempt to understand our host culture a bit better.

Okay - brace yourself.  This is mind-blowing, so you’d best sit down.  As we biked through the suburbs of Monterrey, we could tell we were entering a world-class city, but to learn from our hosts that Monterrey tops the world in soda consumption per capita, tipping the glass at 2 liters per person per day was unimaginable to us.  For a city of 3.8 million, that’s 3 Olympic-sized swimming pools filled with soda each day! Needing to be sure, we asked others we met, with the uniform response of “oh, at least.”  For the statistically-inclined, we might consider that the median is actually higher than 2L - that most people drink more thank that, with those who drink none pulling the average down.  Incredible.

Our experience anecdotally confirmed what we had heard.  Coke and Pepsi, alongside apple, grapefruit, and other sodas stood on most tables at mealtime, with slogans like “a place in your kitchen” (that’s Coke, for the curious).

With soda as the drink of choice for lunch, snack, and supper, it’s little wonder that there are so many signs advertising “new, cheaper diabetes treatments” peppering the streets.  There seemed to be plenty of knowledge of the cause-and-effect present, but economics and the lack of drinkable running water defined choices for families.

So, without really intending to, we attempted what we dubbed “The Monterrey Challenge” - drink 2L of soda in one day.  (We also decided that the real challenge would be to drink the required volume each of the days you stayed in Monterrey, but we weren’t equal to that challenge.)  Even after a half liter each for lunch the day we left Monterrey, we had no intentions of downing four times that before bed, but the economics of it did us in.  With no restaurants in the dusty little town of Puerto México, we stocked up for supper in the only store in town, where a 2.5L bottle of Coke was a better deal than individual .5L bottles for both of us.  Washing down our cold tostadas and refried beans in the dark after almost 80 miles of biking (yes, there’s more of a story here!), we realized we only needed to split a .5L soda to log 2L each for the day.  Jarritos tamarind-flavored soda did the honors.

Ugh.

Anyone up for a challenge?