Local Man Bravely Sips Macaroni Soda, Reports Seeing His Ancestors Shake Their Heads

A LaughParty comic take.

Comic fiction: The events, people and products in this article are invented for laughs. Any resemblance to an actual beverage is your fridge's problem, not ours.

Humanity has achieved many things. We split the atom. We put a rover on Mars. We taught a phone to recognize our face even when we've just woken up looking like a startled potato. And now, in what historians will surely call The Great Fizzling, we have made macaroni and cheese carbonated.

The beverage, a fictional cream soda flavored like boxed mac and cheese, arrived this week at the made-up Snackville Convenience Mart. Its can is a bright, cheerful orange, the exact shade of a traffic cone that has given up on its dreams.

Gary Pemberton, 41, was the first customer brave enough to try it. "I've eaten gas station sushi," he said, staring into the middle distance. "I've had a hot dog that was rotating on that roller since the Clinton administration. I thought I was ready." He was not ready.

Gary describes the first sip as "sweet, then confusing, then deeply personal." Around sip three, he reportedly saw a vision of his great-great-grandmother, a woman who survived a harsh prairie winter on turnips alone, simply holding up a sign that read: WHY.

Food scientists at the entirely imaginary Institute for Questionable Snacks say the drink represents a bold leap forward. "For centuries, people have asked, 'What if my lunch could burp back at me?'" explained Dr. Fenella Crisp, adjusting her safety goggles. "Today, we finally have an answer. It's a bad answer. But it's an answer."

The drink's development reportedly took eighteen months, four focus groups and one intern who now only speaks in bubbles. Early prototypes included a version with real noodles floating inside, which was abandoned after test subjects complained it was "like drinking a lava lamp that's also a casserole."

Not everyone is horrified. Twelve-year-old Mia Okafor gave the soda a glowing review. "It tastes like if a birthday party and a sick day had a baby," she said, before asking if there was a pizza-flavored sparkling water coming next. Several executives in the room immediately began taking notes, and civilization shuddered.

Critics argue this is proof society is moving backward. Supporters argue it's proof society is moving sideways, which is technically still moving. A third group argues nothing at all, because they are busy trying to figure out whether you're supposed to drink it cold or microwave it for three minutes and stir.

As for Gary, he finished the whole can. "It's terrible," he confirmed, wiping a faint orange mustache from his lip. "I'm buying six more. I need my friends to understand what I've been through."

And that, truly, is the human spirit: we may not always make good choices, but we will absolutely make sure everyone we love suffers them with us.

Inspired by I feel like we've been going backwards as a society lately but Kraft Dinner cream soda might be a new low.