The walk from the FT to the Savoy Grill was longer than I remembered. It was a warm London day and I was running late. Arriving, I discovered to my relief that my lunch companion was running even later. “Can I bring you anything to drink?” the woman who showed me to my table asked. A glass of tap water, I said. You would have thought I had requested a lap dance from the maître d’.
After some disapproving shuffling, my water arrived as my companion slipped into her seat. “Some wine?” our waiter asked. Just water, she replied. “Sparkling, still or” – he gave me a sharp glance – “tap water?”
Repeat this performance often enough and I suppose we should not be surprised that sales of bottled water worldwide have increased to 180bn litres a year from 78bn a decade ago. But future generations of historians will surely view our attitude to drinking water with astonishment.
Thames Water charges my household a little over £1 ($2) a day for all the water we can drink and as much as we need to shower, bath, flush the toilets and run the washing machine and dishwasher. Why would we pay a price close to that daily rate for a half-litre plastic bottle of the stuff?
Those of us who have access to clean and safe drinking water are the luckiest people on earth. Millions do not. We are also the luckiest in history. Until a little under a century ago, public drinking water carried with it the risk of typhoid fever or cholera. Only the very poor drank water. Those who could afford it drank beer or tea with boiled water instead. People with some money drank “small beer” – water mixed with enough beer to kill off some of those nasty micro-organisms.
Adding chlorine to the water supply changed all that. In his illuminating book, Wellsprings: a Natural History of Bottled Spring Waters, the American hydrologist, Francis Chapelle, says the chlorination of public drinking water “has probably saved more human lives than any other technological advance in public health history”.
So why do people still buy bottled water? Many say it is the chlorine that drives them to it: they do not like the taste. Except that in blind tastings, most people cannot tell the difference between tap and bottled water. My favourite tasting was carried out in 1997 by The Sunday Times. One supposedly expert member of its panel described a glass of water as having a “fresh, sweet lemony aroma”. It was tap water from a Birmingham public toilet.
Others say they do not believe tap water is as safe as their governments claim. Drinking water poisoned people in Cornwall, south-west England, in 1988. In 1993, hundreds of thousands in Milwaukee suffered diarrhoea and vomiting after the water supply was contaminated. More than 100 died.
But bottled water has had its contamination scares too, although admittedly they have never hurt any one. Perrier had to destroy 160m bottles in 1990 after the discovery of benzene levels twice as high as those regarded as safe by the World Health Organisation. (Benzene is a flammable chemical used in the production of paint and cleaning fluids.)
In 2004, Coca-Cola recalled its Dasani bottled mineral water in the UK after discovering that it contained illegal levels of bromate, a chemical that could increase the risk of cancer. It also emerged that Dasani was processed tap water. Several of the leading brands are processed tap water.
In his book, Mr Chapelle argues that we cannot ascribe the vogue for bottled water to mere shallowness. Worries about water are buried deep in our consciousness.
Water-borne micro-organisms, he writes, “have had 3.9bn years to figure out various ingenious lifestyles for surviving and thriving in water. Humanity, on the other hand, has only been in the water-treatment business for a few hundred years.” Water fussiness is part of what it means to be human.
But even Mr Chapelle’s sympathy is strained by the bottled-water drinkers of New York City, whose tap water arrives from the Catskill Mountains, naturally infused with just enough calcium, magnesium and potassium to give it a truly delicious taste. Yet New Yorkers probably drink more bottled water than anyone. It is about fashion, he concludes.
People spend thousands on luxury-branded handbags for the same reason. But at least buyers of handbags do not receive an unlimited supply of nearly identical products at home almost free of charge.
Still, there is a change in the air. However much people fear chlorine in their water, they fear climate change more. And climate change at least has some solid science behind it. San Francisco’s city authorities and the UK’s Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are questioning the environmental cost of bottling and transporting all that water. Coke and PepsiCo are promising to increase their recycling of plastic water bottles. We can all do our bit. Stand up to those waiters.
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