Sugar-free Lemonade Recipe

I opened the fridge to find a very special treasure inside… sugar-free canned lemonade?! Usually canned lemonade is nasty, so I decided to give it a try.

To my surprise, it was actually fantastic and extremely refreshing! I chugged one can down and looked forward to chugging my second one. I got about halfway through the second one, but almost choked with the following realization: SUGAR-FREE THINGS NEVER TASTE GOOD!

I decided to see what Minute Maid did to make their artificially-sweetened lemonade taste good, so I took a peek at the ingredients. In my opinion, lemonade is supposed to contain just water, lemons, and some form of a sweetener, such as sugar. Apparently Minute Maid disagrees…

Ingredients: pure* filtered water, lemon juice from concentrate, less than 0.5% of natural flavors, citric acid (provides tartness) [the lemons don't do that?], potassium citrate (regulates tartness) [don't you usually just watch the lemon:water ratio?], modified cornstarch [in what way is it modified?], glycerol ester of wood rosin [I don't remember wood or anything like that in my grandma's recipe], sodium hexametaphosphate and sodium benzoate and potassium sorbate and calcium disodium EDTA (to protect taste) [that's a lot of "and then"'s to protect taste... isn't EDTA a pesticide or somethign?], aspartame [okay, that sounds familiar... glad to know there actually is a sweetener in this and the sweet flavor isn't just a byproduct of my tastebuds dying], acesulfame potassium [no explanation needed?], sucralose [another sweetener is really necessary?], yellow #5 [it's in an opaque can... does it really matter what color it is?]

*The purity of the water might have negligible effects on the overall health risk associated with consuming this product due to the other chemicals that are present.