Upsetting Day: Cooking with Mountain Dew 🌭

I’m always fascinated by the internet presence brands cultivate. Life used to be simple for marketers. Don Draper could get trashed all night and then go make one intense five minute speech about how Arby’s roast beef sandwiches taste like kicking your childhood bully’s ass and make seven million dollars. Now brands have to come up with a constant daily stream of themed content across at least four social media platforms, and it is rough. 

Arby’s is just using its Twitter platform to bully people into screaming about meat at this point. The world of online junk food marketing is madness, so of course, I wanted to dive deeper into it. Four months ago, I signed up for the Mountain Dew Dewsletter. I was promised exclusive offers, insider content, fresh news, and epic giveaways in what I assumed would be a weekly email blast from the over-caffeinated sherpas who harvest the Mountain Dew. I haven’t received a single email in four months. Yes, I checked my spam. Mountain Dew ghosted me.

They confirmed that I signed up for the Dewsletter and then disappeared into the night. I feel like a World War I widow awaiting a letter from the front. Where is my beverage? Is it thinking of me?

It’s not like Mountain Dew hasn’t had shit going on. In late June, they reintroduced Mountain Dew Typhoon, which I wouldn’t have known if I wasn’t dedicated to keeping up with Mountain Dew news on my own time. Gee, if only there were some kind of collection of Mountain Dew facts that I could have emailed to me weekly so I wouldn’t have to hunt them down on my own… some kind of… Dewsletter they could call it! 

Anyway, Mountain Dew is my mortal enemy now. Most websites are begging to send me emails. I can’t get them to stop emailing me just to say hi, remind me that they exist, and ask for my money. Meanwhile, I’m over here begging for a single sliver of Mountain Dew information like some sort of beverage spy, and suddenly they want to keep their Dewey secrets. 

So, I’m going to tell you about the worst thing Mountain Dew has ever done. No, I’m not talking about the time they unwisely decided to try and let the internet name their latest flavor and ended up with top polled results like, Mountain Dew Hitler Did Nothing Wrong, Mountain Dew Gushing Granny, and Mountain Dew Sierra Mist. I’m talking about the absolutely nightmare-inducing recipe section of their website. 

In 2020, Mountain Dew celebrated COVID by releasing a limited run of cookbooks on their website that quickly sold out and are now pretty difficult to find thanks to their main audience, people who have lost their ability to taste, recently seeing a huge increase. These cookbooks now resell for around a hundred dollars, and I think the idea of resellers making that much money off their product pissed Mountain Dew off because they’ve been slowly leaking the recipes from the book on their website. I know for a fact that the cookbook featured their recipe for Mountain Dew grilled cheese. The only effective way to ruin cheese, God’s only perfect creation. “Your God is dead,” says MTN DEW® GRILLED CHEESE SANDWICH.

The color and ooziness of that cheese is so profoundly unsettling. It looks like the aftermath of Slimer and Lady Silmer’s date night. It doesn’t just look horrendous, though; it’s also more difficult to make than a regular grilled cheese, and I guarantee you it tastes worse. That’s got to taste like a used nicotine gum sandwich, fucked for twenty minutes by two class five full roaming vapors.

The recipe calls for you to salt butter, a thing that is only milk fat and salt. Also, you need two half sticks of butter. I’m not sure if that means one full stick, or is it referring to half a cup of butter which is one stick, and you actually need two full sticks of butter. I’m sorry that food math is complicated, but I’m trying to figure out how likely this grilled cheese is to explode my heart.

I watched someone on TikTok make this recipe. I’m pretty sure Mountain Dew paid him to because he took the world’s tiniest bite, made a face like he just remembered a witch predicted this was how he would die, then said, “Mmmm, this is delicious.” Plus, he didn’t post another video for six weeks and it was his mother reading an essay called “Things I Wished I’d Done Before I Died of Diarrhea.”

It’s difficult to make a bunch of cheese and double-salted butter taste bad, but dunking it in neon corn syrup probably accomplished it. The principle behind most of the Mountain Dew website recipes seems to be: throw enough butter at Mountain Dew and it will become butter. The obvious problem with these recipes is that they contain Mountain Dew when they should not. Take, for instance, Mountain Dew’s attempt to piss off Italians. 

I get what they were going for with this. They replaced the wine you typically use to deglaze your pan in chicken piccata with Mountain Dew, and they took out the lemon because Mountain Dew tastes kind of like lemon, supposedly. To me it tastes like a lemon that gave up on its dreams and started huffing gasoline. It tastes like pancake syrup trying to describe that lemon to the police.

A sentence I never expected to write pre-apocalypse is: there’s a full two cups of Mountain Dew in this chicken piccata! That’s not a small amount of Mountain Dew. Even reduced by half, these noodles will be soaked in it, and this is a recipe that doesn’t usually contain any sugar, which is the primary ingredient of Mountain Dew. It’s wet Mountain Dew chicken and noodles. These maniacs poured a can of soda over their dinner and called it a recipe. This whole thing may be a long con Mountain Dew is playing on their fans. It’s like when a bully in the cafeteria gives you food and then says, “Dude, sick, I can’t believe you ate that!” 

The Italians weren’t the only culture Mountain Dew needlessly attacked with flavor. Let’s travel south of the border via an Appleebee’s menu for…

This recipe calls for you to marinate the jalapeno’s in Mountain Dew for an hour. Then you also add half a cup of Mountain Dew to the stuffing. It’s too much Dew! I insinuated before that they were hiding the Dew in butter, and now I want to return to that. They should hide the Dew. They should be ashamed of it. 

The audacity of a recipe that calls for you to ruin a package of bacon, in this day and age where bacon costs ten dollars a package, is unbelievable. They may as well suggest that you chuck the bacon into the ocean and watch it float away. The delicate wafting of meat in the waves would give you more satisfaction than eating soggy Mountain Dew-soaked jalapenos. 

I could only find one person who attempted this recipe, and he said it was soggy but also pretty salty and good. However, he also poached an egg in Mountain Dew, so I’m pretty sure he’s a deep fake of a man that’s been layered over a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew to spread their propaganda. When I emailed him about this article, the reply was, “I’m his mother, and his family has heard enough jokes about the MTN DEW jalapeno poppers. There is nothing funny about a son dying of diarrhea.”

In case you were worried Mountain Dew left Asian cuisine untouched, have no fear! There’s no dish that Mountain Dew will not desecrate. 

The TikToker that Mountain Dew paid to create this dish said, “Trust me, this is on another level.” I’m pretty sure that level is the cenobite dimension, and this dinner is the puzzle box that will summon them.

The Mountain Dew website also has a sangria they claim is haunted, which I totally believe. It combines white wine, brandy, Mountain Dew Code Red, and Mountain Dew Live Wire. There’s a Code Red beef brisket, a Live Wire orange chicken, and even a Mountain Dew Fruitcake, which might not be worse than any other fruitcake! 

I’m sorry that I had to do this to you, Mountain Dew. Maybe if you had emailed me like I wanted, all of your dirty secrets could have stayed hidden. Well, guess what? I’m unsubscribing from your little Dewsletter. I’ll get my Mountain Dew news the way normal people do, from the man in the adult Mountain Dew costume I pay to come to my house and tell me I’m pretty.

I’ll live out the rest of my days as an exile from the Dew Nation. A woman Mountain Dewmed to roam the earth unaware if Pitch Black is ever returning to shelves. Nope, I can’t do it; someone, anyone, please email me if Mountain Dew Pitch Black ever returns to shelves! 

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