By Paul Weiser
Bottled water. To us old-timers, the lunacy of the concept is apparent: in civilized countries (that is, north of Mexico) the water is fine to drink from the tap. Sure, it may be a little funny-smelling and give a mild stomach upset when you first encounter a different city’s, but you grow accustomed to the local water in a few days.
Contrast that with the situation at a beach house last week, inhabited by a mix of teens, 20-somethings, 50-somethings and 70-odds. There was a case of bottled water in the refrigerator - which had to be replenished every few days because the teens, the 20s and the more modern-thinking 50-somethings decorated the house and grounds with opened but mostly full water bottles. The mechanism is simple enough: break the seal, quench your immediate thirst, and there’s still three-fourths of a bottle left. So cap it and (why carry the thing around?) leave it. And no one else will drink from it, since you have - nor will you, because you’re not sure that bottle is the one from which you drank, all being identical.
(I suggested marking caps with names or colors and transferring them from bottle to bottle. Blank incomprehension.)
Why on earth do modern Americans behave in this very peculiar way? Let us roll out the candidate reasons.
(1) Up-marketing. There used to be a few foolish mineral waters, Perrier(tm) for example. They were expensive and elitist. Now everyone is rich enough to afford bottled water (though the bottle is junk vinyl instead of green glass and the water’s wellspring a hose at the bottling plant). Fashion masquerades as class.
(2) Medical silliness. The current wisdom is that constant water-drinking is necessary for proper hydration and to flush out fats. Few moderns exercise enough or under sufficiently arduous circumstances that their hydration is in any jeopardy. As to “flushing fats,”
(2a) Drinking water does produce a false sensation of fullness, a placebo for actual nourishing food
(2b) Which is pathologically feared because it can cause weight gain - that is, nourish us.
(3) It’s true that otherwise adequate (indeed, praiseworthy) water treatment does not remove certain spores and bacteria which can harm only those with damaged immune systems, that is, HIV-positive sodomites. These have reason to insist on hyper-pure water; the rest of us don’t, we’re not that sensitive.
(3a) Is First World water treatment generally inadequate? This is the obvious rationalization for a fashionable insistence on bottled water. It seems to have arisen in 1950s and early 1960s Texas, where local water could be distinctly “gippy” in the corrupt one-party administrations of that LBJ era.
(3b) Since this is no longer valid, we’re left with pathological fear of subliminal, ritual contamination. In other words, a variant of the “secondhand smoke” ruse. That first whiff of another city’s water is, like sidestream smoke, unpleasant. To confuse these minor annoyances with real health threats is modernity in a nutcase.
(4) Speaking of smoking, the personal water bottle is its replacement in the context of “something to do with my hands” (also, orally, with the mouth). In this respect bottled water has economic advantages: the bottles are bulkier, look more substantial, and cannot (unlike a pack of cigarettes, or even one smoke) be shared. A perfect encapsulation of the “Me Generation.”
(5) Which brings us to the economic and chemical aspects. Bottled water has value, but solely for its packaging. It’s all packaging, without the complexity of drugs or perfume, the utility of soap or toothpaste.
What will happen next? Two predictions: First, just as the providers of coin-operated tire-inflation boxes cut and destroyed the old free service station air hoses, merchandisers of bottled water will not only disparage tap water, they will try to actually destroy its potability by reducing sanitation standards, introducing foul-smelling chemicals (perhaps rationalized by concern for the AIDS sufferer, who still won’t drink the stuff) and forcing up tap water prices. Some jurisdictions may try to make it illegal to drink - or at least serve commercially - their own city water.
And second, money-hungry municipalities will start trying to tax bottled water. Not because there’s any justification for taxing it, just because it’s a passing stream of money to be thieved. And that, when it catches on, will so quickly destroy the fashion that we’ll end up wondering why there are tax stamps on the only bottled water left - Perrier(tm) in green glass bottles.
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