Literary Assistant Alec Strum on the history of bottled water

In 1976, when the average American consumed 5.7 liters of bottled water annually, he or she would be lucky to find a bottle of Perrier at a gourmet grocery.  A little over thirty years later, we each consume an average of 48.6 liters of the stuff and can choose from more than seven hundred domestic brands in gas stations and corner stores from sea to shining sea.  The ever-increasing ubiquity and endless variety of bottled water is a recent (and for some, inexplicable) phenomenon, but the notion of water-as-commodity is centuries old, and the reasons for its current popularity are rooted in its long and complicated history.

Human beings, at the mercy of the planet’s water supply, have always imbued it with mystical powers.  For millennia, people have traveled to drink from and bathe in the healing waters of renowned springs and streams.  However, it was the Romans who first bottled water (from Source Perrier, among others) as a curative and transported it across long distances.  Centuries later, in 1824, a thermal bath in France owned by the King of Sardinia began to attract visitors.  Two years later, the King authorized the sale of its waters, and in 1829, a company was formed to bottle and distribute them.  It was named for the source—Evian—and it became the first commercial enterprise with exclusive rights to a potable water source.  A craze for water therapies swept Europe and North America, spawning numerous copycats—resort spas for wealthy clients eager to heal what ailed them by “taking the waters.”  The resorts—Perrier in Europe, Poland Spring and Saratoga in the US, to name a few—were happy to increase their cash flow by selling their water off-site.

By the 1920s, however, the fad was fading as twentieth century technology gave rise to artificially carbonated beverages, and by the middle of the century the resorts were mostly abandoned.  Bottled water remained a small industry throughout the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, but soon, the very product that had almost been its undoing—soda—would facilitate its meteoric rise. The escalation of the cola wars in the 1980s led to a dramatic increase in American consumption of single-serve beverages.  But, while we were growing accustomed to drinking on the go and tossing the refuse, we began to think more about what we were drinking.  Rising awareness of American obesity over the last three decades has pushed many Americans to look for something to replace all that sugar without having to kick the plastic bottle habit, too.  Enter good-old calorie-free water.

The world now faces several new challenges.  Even if we are weaning ourselves off of soda (and that’s a big “if”), we’re still addicted to plastic.  Though people first began bottling water from pristine, mineral-rich sources, the health benefits they advertise have never been rooted in hard science, and today’s bottled water is, more often than not, indistinguishable from or even inferior to ordinary tap water in most of the developed world.  Bottled water is significantly less regulated and often more likely to contain contaminants (biological and chemical) than US tap water, and the lack of fluoride in bottled water is leading to a national rise in tooth decay.  The costs, both economic and environmental, of manufacturing and transporting plastic bottles to carry billions of gallons of water, are astronomical. 

The pale orange sun rising over snowcapped peaks on your bottle of Aquafina may stir in your subconscious an ancient yearning for a miracle elixir, but the purified tap-water that Pepsi-Co fills it with isn’t worth the cost of all that advertising.  As the characters in A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick come to understand, water is no more a commodity than the blood in our veins, and it may be dangerous for us to accept the proposition that it is.

Comments

[orexis online 50]

Is there any substantive difference in the nutritive value of tap
water vs diet soda, excluding potential calcium leeching effects of
phosphorus content inherent in any cola? Specifically, it is oft-heard
from diet pundits that you should drink 8 glasses of water per day.
When further pressed on whether soda, coffee etc count, the answer is
always "NO", sometimes with an admonition that you drink extra water
if you drink soda or coffee. What is the scientific consensus on
this? Is there really a difference?

[cerebritis]

I noticed at the laundrymat that the water does not appear at the bottom of the window, it only rises just below - presumably filling a basin below that the perforated washer chamber / cylnder spins thru. I know that they've had a problem with patrons putting in too much soap and causing an overflow. I'm wondering if they are reducing the water level in the washer to combat that problem (and cut down on their costs for water and hot water - very cheap place)?