The Year We Embraced Our Destruction
© Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty
The sounds came out of my mouth with an unexpected urgency. The cadence was deliberate—more befitting of an incantation than an order: one large strawberry-lemon-mint Charged Lemonade. The words hung in the air for a moment, giving way to a stillness punctuated only by the soft whir of distant fluorescent lights and the gentle hum of a Muzak cover of Bruce Hornsby’s “Mandolin Rain.”
The time was 9:03 a.m.; the sun had been up for only one hour. I watched the kind woman behind the counter stifle an eye roll, a small mercy for which I will be eternally grateful. Her look indicated that she’d been through this before, enough times to see through my bravado. I was just another man standing in front of a Panera Bread employee, asking her to hand me 30 fluid ounces of allegedly deadly lemonade. (I would have procured it myself, but it was kept behind the counter, like a controlled substance.)
I came to Panera to touch the face of God or, at the very least, experience the low-grade anxiety and body sweats one can expect from consuming 237 milligrams of caffeine in 15 minutes. Really, the internet sent me. Since its release last year, Panera’s highly caffeinated Charged Lemonade has become a popular meme—most notably on TikTok, where people vlog from the front seat of their car about how hopped up they are after chugging the neon beverage. Last December, a tongue-in-cheek Slate headline asked, “Is Panera Bread Trying to Kill Us?”
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