A Closer Look at Saabira Chaudhuri’s Agenda

There’s a new book just out from a journalist we know well, the longtime beverage reporter for the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Saabira Chaudhuri. For many years, we diligently interacted in good faith with Ms. Chaudhuri – in interviews, backgrounders, answering innumerable queries every time she reached out. But despite having received a mountain of material from us: industry data, history and issue responses, she decided that her readers did not need to know the facts about the safety, quality, and very small environmental footprint of bottled water products.   

It turns out Ms. Chaudhuri was hiding something – a radical agenda she now trumpets in her new polemic book, Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic. In fact, she recycles a well-trodden political genre that frames consumers as gullible and hypnotized, so addled that only a sweeping overhaul of our economic system can set things right.

That includes sharply ideological works like Affluenza: How Overconsumption is Killing Us (2001), Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers (2016), No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (1999), Stuffocation: Why We've Had Enough of Stuff (2015), and The Story of Stuff: How Our Obsession with Stuff is Trashing the Planet (2010).

"As I did the reporting for this book," Chaudhuri writes in the preface to Consumed, "my own perceptions about the origins of our waste and litter problems, and the solutions we should pursue, shifted. I went from being narrowly focused on plastic as a material to seeing our problems as rooted in the overarching convenience model predicated on disposability that plastic has so cheaply enabled and accelerated."

But there was no actual epiphany here. Chaudhuri’s entire body of reporting at WSJ reflects this same politicized outlook. From early on, her coverage followed a remarkably consistent storytelling arc: companies are obstructive and sweeping mandates are a political imperative.

And just how radical are those ideas? Have a look. Chaudhari insists, “We need a total revamp of how products are priced to account for their impacts on the environment and human health, incentivising – and, in many cases, requiring – companies, and indeed all of us, to make better choices.”

She says “Ultimately, the solution lies in regulatory measures that mandate companies to make design changes to products.” What sort of solutions? ““There is a simple yet powerful way to improve both plastics recycling and reuse – make brands use similar packaging for products in the same category.”

Companies must be legally forced, she says, because “If they’re publicly traded, the contorted system that binds them to maximising profit for shareholders over anything else can also effectively mean their hands are tied.”

And consumers (that’s you) must be forced because “We are saddled with an addiction to disposability so deep that tackling it will require a wholesale rewriting of the rules that have governed business and consumption for the past 70 years.”

All throughout, Chaudhuri’s reporting excludes data or perspectives that complicate her thesis — especially those that speak to trade-offs, incremental progress, or alternative waste-management models.

When discussing bottled water or any other popular product, she often emphasizes the environmental cost of disposability — seldom noting the safety, convenience, enjoyment, and public health reasons many consumers choose those products.

Woven into nearly every article is the insulting notion that consumers are overwhelmed by inertia, misled by marketing, or complicit without full awareness.

That depiction clashes with lived reality. Countless people — parents, commuters, rural households — make deliberate packaging and product choices every day. They look intently for a whole range of factors that suit their individual preference -- for cost, reliability, availability, safety, and convenience.

Chaudhuri’s body of work reads like a longstanding advocacy campaign disguised in the trappings of business reporting. News outlets like the Wall Street Journal promise readers they will be objective, neutral, balanced, and forthright. But in this case the paper allowed sharply ideological framing, informed by a radical worldview, with the explicit intent of pushing political and regulatory outcomes.

In Consumed, Chaudhuri now wears the activist label openly. The narrative is no longer camouflaged — it comes out of a bullhorn: a call to dismantle convenience, to eliminate disposability, and force ordinary people to reorient their lives around the peculiar obsessions of activists like her.