Get Smart

I want to be down with the young people of the Now Generation, so today I bought a bottle of Glaceau SMARTWATER from Energy Beverages, a division of our friends at the Coca-Cola Company, Atlanta, Georgia. The label proudly boasts “Vapor distilled water and electrolytes for taste purely balanced pH”. It further asserts I’d experience “hydration I could feel”. Nothing I like better than a tasty electrolyte. In 2018, SMARTWATER was awarded the German Goldener Windbeutel ("Golden Windbag") anti-award by the consumer rights advocacy group Foodwatch Germany for "the most brazen lie in food advertising" that year. The group said that SMARTWATER is "nothing but ordinary water" sold by advertising a "scientifically-sounding but completely unnecessary production process" which yields no proven nutritional benefits - for as much as seven times the price of regular water. But Glaceau SMARTWATER provides so much more than excessive cost and humbug…