Kool-Aid Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
Kool-Aid is a fruit-flavored soft drink concentrate made by Kraft Foods, Inc. Kool-Aid is sold as a powder to be mixed with water, and versions are made with and without sugar (including an artificially-sweetened, non-sugar version, Sugar-Free Kool-Aid).Originally, Kool-Aid was made as a liquid concentrate and was called Fruit-Smack. To reduce shipping costs, in 1927, Edwin Perkins discovered a way to remove the liquid from Fruit-Smack, leaving only a powder. This powder was then renamed Kool-Ade (and a few years later, Kool-Aid).
The product mascot of Kool-Aid, the Kool-Aid Man is a gigantic anthropomorphic frosty pitcher filled with Kool-Aid and marked with a fingerprinted Smiley face on it, frequently seen on any of the product's television advertisements. These ads typically start out with children indoors wishing they had something to drink, whereupon the Kool-Aid Man bursts through the wall (inevitably accompanied by the character's catch-phrase, "Oh, Yeah!"), Kool-Aid in hand.
Because it contains highly concentrated artificial colorss, and because the unsweetened concentrate is very inexpensive (around US$0.20 a packet as of 2004), Kool-Aid is sometimes used to dye fabric and hair.
In the 1960s Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were notorious (partly justifiably) for lacing Kool-Aid with LSD at gatherings. Publication of journalist Tom Wolfe's recollection of their mad tour, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, which epitomized this aspect of the decade of the 1960s, cannot have been greeted with pleasure at Kraft Foods.
In 1978, 900 followers of cult leader Jim Jones committed suicide by drinking a grape-flavored drink laced with cyanide at their commune in Jonestown, Guyana. This drink is often said to have been Kool-Aid, and this popular misconception is so widespread that to "drink [someone's] Kool-Aid" and to be a "Kool-Aid drinker" has acquired the meaning of having been utterly deceived by someone to the point of destruction. In fact, the drink at Jonestown was Flavor Aid, a cheaper imitation of Kool-Aid.