Bottled Water Nonsense, BBC Pretension

                                         Bottled Water

Blue and Green Bottles and Oranges, 

Spencer Gore (1878-1914) 

Photo Credit: Yale Centre for British Art 

For all the innovation and choice that define the food and drink industries, if you want to make money, you could do a lot worse than bung some water in a bottle and flog it. A litre of tap water, the stuff we have ingeniously piped into our homes, costs less than half a penny. A litre of bottled water can cost well over a pound, especially for something fancy that has been sucked through a mountain.

Yet the bottled water market is more buoyant than ever, defying the plastics backlash inspired by stricken albatrosses on the BBC’s Blue Planet, and a broader, growing sense that something has to change.

Sales in the UK were worth a record £558.4m in the year to last November, an increase of 7% according to the latest figures from the market analyst Kantar.

“It’s very surprising to me,” says Sam Chetan-Walsh, a political advisor at Greenpeace and campaigner against ocean plastic. “Public awareness has never been higher, but the message is not quite reaching all the people it needs to…If a product that is so nakedly unnecessary can exist, then the whole system is failing.”

…But even if large numbers of us are quitting bottled water because of care for the environment, others are taking it up. The introduction of the “sugar tax” on juices and fizzy drinks has pushed more people to bottled water, while health awareness has boosted its desirability. Kantar says tap water consumption is growing at roughly the same pace (we still drink almost three times as much tap water as bottled water)

…Flavoured water is booming: sales of the sparkling variety shot up by 20%, according to the latest Kantar data.

…As is so often the case, ingenious marketing can trump reason; awareness is rarely enough. “There is always this kind of slip between concern, intent and changed behaviour,” says Giles Quick, an analyst at Kantar. “The best example is five a day. Almost everyone is aware of it, but something like 15% of us achieve it.” Unless a far-reaching bottle ban does come into force, it will be up to consumers to not only demand change – but to act themselves.

(Simon Usborne, The Guardian, 2019)

A few questions. Why does anyone drink bottled water? Why did anyone start to drink bottled water? Ingenious marketing? I don’t think so. If that was the case why aren’t more of us in this country, drinking bottled water? We only drink three times as much tap water as bottled in the UK. How pathetic is that? Just drink water when you are thirsty and from the tap. Rant over.

BBC

Symphony in White, No.111, 

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903)

Photo Credit: The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts,
University of Birmingham, [CC BY-NC-ND]

Organisers of the BBC Proms are considering staging a concert in the dark where people can get away from it all by immersing themselves in meditative, mindful music.

Plans for the first Meditative Prom were revealed in the programme announcement of the summer festival, which is 90% classical but will this year have East Coast hip-hop and the Clangers as alternate options.

The late-night Meditative Prom at the Royal Albert Hall will have short pieces of music “to calm the mind and nourish the soul, said the schedulers.

“I still don’t know whether we can achieve this, but it would be lovely to do the whole concert in the dark,” said BBC Proms director David Pickard. “We did think about calling it the Mindfulness Prom, but we thought maybe that was a statement too far. I cannot claim that you will come out of it feeling a new person and your life will be changed, but there’s an element, I hope, that will have an effect on wellbeing. I hope that’s not too pretentious or pompous.”

(The Guardian, 2019)

I’m afraid it is, David, I’m afraid it is.