Cynthia Barnett And Selling Bottled Water

Together, the passages “Business in a Bottle”, by Cynthia Barnett and “Selling Bottled Water: The Modern Medicine Show”, by Peter Gleick, portray how bottled water has taken a superficial and deceptive image due to false advertising and pseudoscientific claims by greedy bottling companies, whose purpose is to take advantage of a free resource in order to make millions in profit; destroying the environment as they go. Both passages expose the bottling companies’ manipulative tricks, in order to bring awareness and open the populations’ eyes to the lies they have been fed for many years, however the authors utilize distinct styles to achieve their goal. Barnett focuses on specific bottling companies’ data and incorporates analysts for support,

As a sub-claim, Barnett and Gleick illustrate how marketing and false advertising play a major role in the creation of the grandiose image of bottled water. As a ground Barnett states, how “Aquafina” gets their water from the Detroit River”, however places “snow-capped mountain peaks” on its labels, while “Everest Water” comes from “Corpus Christi, not Mt. Everest”, and “Glacier Clear Water” is actually “tap water from Greeneville, Tennessee” (Barnett 34). Barnett states the actual sources of well-known bottling companies, which are consumed by many people on a daily basis. Reading this information allows the audience to reconsider their previous beliefs on bottled water and not base all their judgment on labels. Another ground used by Barnett, is how a beverage analyst, Hemphill, believes “consumers base their bottles-water decisions on three things: convenience, the packaging, and the price as more important than whether its drinking water or spring water” (Barnett 35). This ground illustrates the superficiality of water bottles, where the image of the bottle is more important than the actual content. Barnett uses the analyst to convince her audience of the business in water bottles; not a necessity anymore, but a

Gleick leans more into the pseudoscientific claims and structures his argument differently. Unlike Barnett, Gleick starts by introducing the history of water marketing as early as the 1630’s. Gleick states as a ground, in “1630 a Massachusetts merchant was fined for claiming his special water would cure scurvy” (Gleick 40). Gleick starts with a brief history introduction for his audience to understand false advertising has been around for very long and still lives today with bottling companies. This ground allows the audience to compare the past to the present and acknowledge that false advertising has evolved to be more subtle and hard to detect, since companies found a way for the population to fall in their webs. Now, emotions come into place. Bottling companies promote water that makes you slim, lose fears, and even offer health and emotional salvation, which is very tempting to buy. In his argument, Gleick lists important pseudoscientific ideas in separate paragraphs for the audience to detect more easily. As a ground Gleick states, “if you can come up with two or more pseudoscientific, hyphenated word-some of them adjectives and one of them ‘water’, you too can market bottled water”(Gleick 42). This ground portrays how easy it is to fool the population by using vivid terms, however Gleick uses this phrase as his first sentence of the separated paragraph for the audience to read carefully.