July 31, 2025 | Boston Globe
Border walls and tariffs must be high against Mexico, but the Cokes it exports to the United States get a pass. A product beloved by immigrants and cool kids alike, it is known for its real cane sugar and retro glass bottle. And it’s a product that, in its very sweetness, shows that taste is political—that what we consume is shaped by trade policies, subsidies, and the strength of our regulatory institutions.
Amanda Ciafone, Associate Professor of Media and Cinema Studies
Amanda Ciafone, associate professor of media and cinema studies, discusses the strange contradictions in American health policy in a Boston Globe op-ed piece titled “A delicious irony: Why Trump prefers Mexican Coca-Cola.”
“When President Trump recently professed his preference for ‘REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States,’ he may have been remembering the Cokes of his youth. More likely he was thinking of the taste of a ‘Mexican Coke,’ the only version of Coca-Cola sweetened with real sugar, rather than high-fructose corn syrup, that is commercially available in the United States—and it’s imported from Mexico,” Ciafone writes. “It was hard not to marvel at the irony.”