{"id":795,"date":"2021-06-16T10:50:09","date_gmt":"2021-06-16T14:50:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/js1cd06kre.onrocket.site\/?p=795"},"modified":"2021-06-16T10:50:09","modified_gmt":"2021-06-16T14:50:09","slug":"labels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2021\/06\/16\/labels\/","title":{"rendered":"Labels"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Want to steer away from controversy at your next dinner engagement? 

Avoid three topics:  Politics, religion, and what constitutes the best drinking water. 

Bottled or tap?  Spring-fed or snow melt?  Brand names or generic?  Isn\u2019t it all just water<\/em>?

Perrier launched the bottled water craze by putting a few ounces of \u201cimported\u201d H20 into a fancy bottle and selling it for a great deal of money.  More than 400 companies have since followed suit.

Brands include Venus, which markets itself as “the water for women.”  For those who are thirsty for something international, there’s Himalaya, Fiji, Mai Dubai, Panama Blue, and Samaria.  If you’re yearning to think about breakfast throughout the day, there’s Kellogg’s Special K20 Protein Water.  

As far as we know, Earth is the only place in the solar system that is blessed with liquid water.  It\u2019s not off the mark to describe it as a miraculous medium.  As residents of Nevada, California, and Utah are discovering anew this year, life disappears when water disappears. 

Water covers two-thirds of our planet.  It emerges from drinking fountains for free, and costs only a few pennies from the tap.  So why do we buy it in bottles at the rate of five dollars a gallon — considerably more than the current cost of gasoline?

It\u2019s because bottled water tastes better.  Right?<\/em>

Independent taste tests consistently say otherwise.  When people don\u2019t see the labels \u2013 when all we have to rely on is our taste buds \u2013 the results are often surprising.

When John Stossel worked as a consumer reporter for ABC News, he engineered a blind comparison of a number of water samples.  The test included Evian and Iceland Spring (expensive imports); Aquafina (America\u2019s number one bottled brand); American Fare (Kmart\u2019s discount brand); Poland Spring (bottled not in Poland, but here in the States); and some water from a public drinking fountain from the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. 

Only one water was rated \u201cbad.\u201d  That was Evian, the most expensive.  Kmart came in first, Aquafina second, and, to the surprise of all the participants, the Harlem tap water came in third.  Even those who declared beforehand they couldn\u2019t abide the taste of tap water loved what came from the ancient underground pipes of NYC. 

Recent winners of the \u201cbest tasting water in America\u201d competition, by the way, have come from the public systems of Hamilton, Ohio, and Easthampton, Massachusetts.   

Laboratory tests also consistently show that bottled water \u2013 up to 500 times more expensive than tap \u2013 is not any cleaner or healthier than the water that comes from our public utilities. 

Stossel asked the Bottled Water Association for an opinion from one of their own experts.  They recommended Dr. Stephen Edberg of Yale University\u2019s School of Medicine.  Stossel asked:  \u201cIs bottled water healthier than tap?\u201d  Edberg answered, memorably, \u201cI wouldn\u2019t say, uh, it\u2019s healthier than tap water.  I mean, uh, it\u2019s both, they both provide, uh, water.\u201d

Bottled water is amazingly convenient, of course.  But the use-once-throw-away plastic containers are becoming an ecological nightmare.  And we must admit that the real attraction of bottled H20 is that it has been brilliantly marketed.  Those special labels make regular old water seem, uh, truly extraordinary.  Even good sense and good taste have a hard time overcoming the biases imposed by clever branding.

All of us are capable of being fooled by labels.  That includes our encounters with fellow human beings.

In the New Testament book that bears his name, the apostle James offers this strong warning:  \u201cIf you show special attention to the person wearing fine clothes and say, \u2018Here\u2019s a good seat for you,\u2019 but say to the poor person, \u2018You stand there,\u2019 or, \u2018Sit on the floor by my feet,\u2019 have you not discriminated among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts?\u201d (James 2:3-4)

In our celebrity-obsessed culture, it\u2019s tempting to treat people differently because of their packaging.

What are the chances that you’ll meet someone important today?  Every person you see, every driver sitting behind the wheel in that snarl of traffic, everyone standing in line beside you at Subway, is a human being crafted in the image of God. 

The only <\/em>people you will meet today, in fact, will be uniquely special and infinitely treasured.  Each of them will be the Real Thing, no matter what disguise they happen to be wearing.

When it comes to water and relationships, we don\u2019t have to get fooled by the labels.    

Evian, after all, is just \u201cna\u00efve\u201d spelled backwards.
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Want to steer away from controversy at your next dinner engagement?  Avoid three topics:  Politics, religion, and what constitutes the best drinking water.  Bottled or tap?  Spring-fed or snow melt?  Brand names or generic?  Isn\u2019t it all just water? Perrier launched the bottled water craze by putting a few ounces of \u201cimported\u201d H20 into a fancy bottle and selling it… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":796,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[33],"class_list":["post-795","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-judging-others"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=795"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":797,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions\/797"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}