The New Pepsi Thing

Karissa Lindstrand works in the Canadian fishing industry on a boat off the coast of New Brunswick. She also happens to be a huge Pepsi fan. She drinks 12 cans a day! Some days she spends hours binding the claws of lobsters, a task that requires sturdy rubber gloves or your hands turns into reddened claws themselves.

So what are the chances that Karissa of all people would find an imprint of a partial Pepsi can on the claw of a lobster? A zillion to one? But that is exactly what happened Nov. 21 on a boat called Honour Bound off Grand Manan.

Because of her Pepsi addiction, she instantly recognized the blue and red logo. At first, when I read about this in a CBS News internet story, I thought maybe it was a mix of algae and her imagination. But then I took a closer look at the image and there it was: the partial side of a can with the logo and the top of the can with even the tab visible on the impression.

“I can’t say how he got it on,” Lindstrand said, who has worked in the Canadian lobster fishing industry for four years. “It seemed more like a tattoo or a drawing on the lobster rather than something growing into it.”

In the days since she found the lobster and snapped photos of the claw, she’d heard a number of theories, even from the Pepsi delivery man who works Grand Manan. Crew members thought that the lobster must’ve somehow been attached to a can in the bottom of the ocean and it grew around the can. Others think part of a label from a Pepsi box stuck to the lobster when it was growing.

For Lindstrand, the incident stamps what she already knew, that there’s a lot of garbage in the ocean that is affecting lobsters and other sea creatures.

From our point of view, the fact that the highly unusual soft drink imprint on the claw was found by someone who says she drinks up to 360 cans of Pepsi a month is a synchronistic warning of what we are all doing to the environment. The claw is a destopian insignia from nature, a warning about the danger of an eventual environmental collapse.

Degradation of our eco-system seems like a gradual process, one that has been underway for decades and increasing exponentially with the growth of world population. However, what seems gradual at some point surely willreach a tipping point when the chain of life is broken and species die en masse. And one of those species is us.

This new Pepsi thing is certainly something the company won’t want to crow about, but it’s something we all should know about and think about.