THE BOHRN IDENTITY — Sugary drinks don’t always taste sweet

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/04/2013 (4814 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Yesterday, Brandon University regular session classes wrapped up for the year. Regardless of relentless frost, the idea of summer vacation is thick in the air around campus.

Our student council, however, is still pensively sitting in their shadowy meeting room, discussing what’s to become of the student body next year — in a very literal way.

The student council is currently negotiating a new soft-drink agreement for the whole of Brandon University’s campus.

Pepsi is the current provider, as you can tell if you ever walk around campus — the blue Pepsi logo is all over their giant ubiquitous product dispensers. The machines glow down hallways like neon spectres in the middle of the night, ghoulishly humming to themselves.

The council is in talks with both Coke and Pepsi. What’s there to say? I’m curious how one even addresses the spokespeople for anti-health, these purveyors of human sickness through sexy marketing, the cigarette companies of my generation. Although I doubt BU ever had cigarette dispensers in the Health Sciences department.

Does the student council get paid money to let these guys pull their slow poison trick on our collective student body? I hope they’re being paid well — 30 pieces of silver, at least.

You know, whatever, man — it’s a free country. If kids want to suckle the teats of colourful bottles instead of drinking water from a fountain, or are plainly addicted to sugar and need a daily fix before withdrawal kicks in while school commitments press in on them from all sides, then they can do what they want. Everybody has free reign over the most expensive, delicate, irreplaceable and complicated pieces of equipment any of us will ever get to use in our lifetimes — our own human bodies.

Most soda drinkers are just normal, beautiful human beings who don’t fully grasp the difficult fact that soft drinks are tasty poison: they have been proven to kill you eventually with all sorts of sickness, including heart disease, obesity and diabetes, all preventable diseases. They seriously damage your beautiful daily life with unnecessary crashes and cravings, and tremendously effect your vitality and productivity.

And they make you fat! Is that not enough motivation? I mean it! You drink soft drinks, you get fat! However, if you stop, you will not be so fat. And who needs the temptation of sugary fizz feebly glowing at them in every hallway? Get rid of them, I say!

University students are adults, they should be able to drink whatever they want. But that doesn’t mean I have to welcome the harbingers of premature, preventable death into the school and community that I love.

I know, it’s not anybody’s fault, we’re just biologically programmed to consume the greatest amount of calories we can in the present moment, because who knows what life will have in store for us in the next — you might need to run away from a sabre tooth tiger or something.

According to the student newspaper The Quill, neither Pepsi nor Coke is happy with the bottled water ban in place on campus, but don’t even get me started. Basically, some people would rather have water shipped across the planet by plane or by truck at exorbitant costs because they don’t like the taste of tap water.

To quote a disgruntled online commenter: “If the city of brandon has a problem with (bottled water). Then they should get a water softening system in the places that are runned by the city.”

It’s a real problem. People should enjoy their water drinking experience. We should improve our tap water. But don’t think that it’s OK to bring about the environmental apocalypse in the meantime.

At least with Brandon University’s bottled water ban, in place since 2009, we’ve been able to stop selling a tremendously wasteful and costly product — financially and environmentally costly, not to mention spiritually detrimental.

As in, how can we blindly begin the privatization something as crucial to life as water?

I see where that trend is going, on a generational scope and I feel compelled to stop it. Great success in our bottled water ban, BU. Now here’s to getting rid of the rest.

» Natalie Bohrn is a local university student.