Touting the tap.
It used to be conventional wisdom that the best water came out of a bottle, and the farther away the water and the bottle came from, the better -- Perrier, San Pellegrino, Ramlosa, Evian and hundreds more besides. There's a running gag in Robert Altman's movie The Player about which exotic water characters order in restaurants and during meetings -- the more obscure, the more impressive. In Los Angeles, there were even water bars that served nothing else. Yes, it's all kind of ridiculous. And, more seriously, really bad for the environment.
Minneapolis, San Francisco and Salt Lake City are all pushing municipal water; an effort to get people to head for the tap instead of the corner store or the fridge when they're thirsty. New York City is going further, with a $700,000 advertising campaign on transit and radio to get New Yorkers to pass on the Poland Spring, evade the Evian and ditch the Dasani in favor of what hash-house wait-staff used to call "one on the city."
Lora
I agree, the move away from town water to water in one-use bottles is a travesty. I guess we have to use up the byproduct sludge of oil refining somehow; we can't just dump it!
I have an easy way to get safe drinking water in my town. We can buy town water using re-usable containers. That way I have access to the latest, greatest science on clean drinking water for pennies.
I refuse to buy one-use water bottles (unless I have no choice)!
Lindsay
Bottled water has never made sense to me. I grew up on well water that came from a spring. When bottled water became 'the hype' was about the first time a friend asked me "is it ok to drink your tap water?". Well, you've been drinking it for the past 16 years - why the change? I will always continue to get my 2 daily litres from the tap.
Steph
I think people would be more willing to drink tap water if it was not filled with all these chemicals. Personally I don't want to drink chlorine because it's not good for my heatlh and I don't want to ingest the poison that is fluoride when I drink water.
Vanessa
Bottled water is ridiculous. My family buys it all the time and I don't know why. It is a waste of our money. Why buy water when your tap water is just fine? The bottled water that my parents buy comes from the same source as our tap water. It makes no sense.