Essential

My employer provides a variety of liquid refreshments to staff (in stark contrast to my previous employer, which didn’t even give us coffee or tea). In addition to a Peets multi-coffee beverage machine and two Nespresso espresso jobbers, there are two industrial fridges containing varieties of Red Bull, bottled iced tea, milk (whole and two-percent), both Pepsi and Coke products (including, God save the mark, Fresca) and flavored waters.

The latter includes still and fizzy. What flavors get stocked seems to depend on the whim of the vendor. Recently the sparkling stuff has toggled between Poland Spring bottles and cans of La Croix. Poland Spring has a somewhat narrow spectrum—orange, raspberry-lime, lemon, lime and just plain old. But La Croix is quite exotic—passionfruit, lemon, coconut, peach-pear, tangerine, mango and pamplemousse.

(Why they choose to translate grapefruit into French and not any of the others, I do not know. I don’t make this stuff up, I just report it.)

Well, I’ve tried them all, because why not? Frankly, Poland Spring does a better job of making the flavors taste natural. I love passionfruit, but can’t quite get into the La Croix version. Even their lemon tastes faux, tbh. And I dumped out nearly a whole can of the coconut stuff after a couple of mouthfuls. And I am cuckoo for coconut.

But here’s what really got me—they tout it as “naturally essenced”. (Even spellcheck knows that verbing that noun is an abomination.)

Marketeers, man.