Idle State

The benefits: my teeth, of course, due to the addition of fluoride; the addition of iodine was to avoid thyroid problems; chlorine kept the water bacteria free; and calcium, iron and other minerals in the water helped me reach my daily requirement of vital minerals.

I guess there was a little lead in the water too, from the plumbing but on the whole I, and several hundred thousand other Australians, grew up to be more or less healthy adults.

Even today, I only drink tap water. I've regretted it, briefly, once or twice - accidently and absently (habit, really) washing my tooth brush in tap water once in India and then spending the next three days being somewhat sick and then once again when I was on holidays in Far North Queensland in Australia - when I caught Giardia from the tap water. Not a bad batting average for the first thirty-something years.

Those few incidents aside, I wonder why we're so quick to ditch the benefits that we get from tap water - for bottled water. I wonder if bottled petrol became available would it be the choice of the upwardly mobile or would the sheer ludicrousness of replacing a perfectly good, practical, efficient and cost effective piped system for delivering liquid with using thousands of plastic bottles cause a public outcry for the sake of the environment.

Proponents of bottled water often claim that it is purer (which I doubt and is widely reported as not being the case), tastes better (well this is hard to quantify and subject to personal taste but methinks the Emperor isn't wearing any clothes), is convenient (well, yes, it is but how freakin' lazy are we becoming?!?) It all reeks of being somewhat bourgeois if you ask me.

The purity argument is somewhat fallacious anyway. Exposure to pathogens (but not toxins) is a great way to develop a strong immune system. Particularly in children. I'm sure that we've all seen the cotton-wool wrapped kid who is always sick - as a result of the attempts to eliminate their exposure to germs. Being exposed to germs is part of life so they may as well get used to it from an early age.

On the downside, bottled water:

• often has a lot of the goodness removed via filtration, osmosis or distillation;


• is in plastic bottles and then shrink wrapped or boxed which is an environmental disaster in it's own right. Read this and this;


• often doesn't have to meet standards that town water supplies have to meet;


• costs upwards of 20 times the price of tap water;


• is incredibly awkward to have to buy in bulk from the supermarket due to it's size and weight; and


• is frequently known to have traces of arsenic, synthetic chemicals and bacteria.

Charming.

Here's an interesting thing to do. Buy a bottle of water. Then stop and say to yourself a few times - "I paid $1 for a 300 ml of water." Feel free to substitute your own currency and bottle size. Starts to sound absurd fairly quickly, if you ask me.

I read a NYT Op Ed piece the other day that suggested that Cask Wine is the environmentally friendly way to buy wine - and had various other benefits such as the wine lasting longer from opening and being easier to pour (?). The biggest problem, as suggested by some commenters, is that most cask wine tastes like crap. Things are changing though, and I notice in Australia that quite a number of very nice wines are available in casks. So, all purism aside, the practicality of a great wine in a cask appeals to me. Like the cork itself, I'm sure that a moment or two of cackled thoughts about the lack of a bottle will yield to function rather than form for home consumption.

So my question is, is this the way of bottled water too? Are we seeing the renaissance of tap water?

I suspect that here in the Middle East I'm not going to see tap water take-off in restaurants. To test this, I asked for tap water at a coffee shop today and was flatly refused. After all, there was perfectly good bottled water available.

In the Middle East, you are frowned upon like you are some boorish sod if you display anything less than dripping opulence - particularly in retail establishments. (Try refusing a shopping bag here! It's just implausible that anyone at all wouldn't want a bag. More than once, I've been in a shop here and the person behind the counter just couldn't bring themselves, after several moments of consideration, incomprehension and then hesitation, to hand over my single item sans bag - despite my numerous protestations.) Environment be damned.

I figure that everyone accepts the status quo because, face it, 80% of the population are in a 3 year transit through the Middle East. So we're more or less content to eat up the relentless consumerism. Living in the Middle East is the epitome of escapism from having a social conscience for the ex-patriot. For the locals, they don't seem to know any different.

Nonetheless, I'll keep trying to get my tap water. In the meantime, I do enjoy * San Pellegrino with my dinner. It tastes great. Leonardo da Vinci thought so too.