Gulp, gulp, gullible
By Shankar Vedantam | theage.com.au | 04 August
In Tokyo and Paris, you can now spend $US5 ($5.20) a glass on special beverages selected by a professional sommelier.
Nothing surprising there, except the beverages being served are different brands of bottled water with various "flavours" supposedly matched to different foods.
Desalinated seawater from Hawaii, meanwhile, is being sold as "concentrated water" at $US33.50 for a 59-millilitre bottle. Like any concentrated beverage, it is supposed to be diluted before drinking, except that in this case, that means adding water to water.
And from Tennessee, a company named BlingH2O with marketing imagery featuring a mostly nude model improbably balancing a bottle of water between her heel and her hip is selling its water at $40 for 750 millilitres, with special-edition bottles going for $480 about 6 million times the price of the liquid that comes from your tap.
The push to turn water into the new wine is a marketing phenomenon. The bottled-water industry is engaged in an intense effort to convince us that the stuff in bottles is substantially different from the stuff out of the tap.
But empirical tests have repeatedly shown that they are generally the same. In blind taste tests, many people who swear they can differentiate between bottled-water brands and tap water fail to spot the differences, and studies have shown that both are fine to drink, and both occasionally can have quality problems.
Experts who study bottled water as a cultural phenomenon say differences between the two are largely marketing inventions.
"Taste for water is as much an effort of imagination as it is an objective fact," says Richard Wilk, a professor of anthropology and gender studies at Indiana University in the US, who studies the phenomenon. "The labels have springs and waterfalls and mountains. The latest waters are from Antarctica and Iceland; there is glacier water and iceberg water, and water that is a million years old, and water from 900 metres off Hawaii. All of these things promise an untouched nature far from human beings."
There is abundant irony in such marketing. The supply of clean drinking water across many countries including the US and Australia is an underappreciated scientific and technological achievement. Trillions of dollars have been spent to get clean drinking water to people ? and it is people in precisely these countries who seem willing to pay premiums of 1000% to 10,000% for bottled water.
As the wealthiest billion people on the planet increasingly turn to bottled water, the poorest billion have no or little access to clean water.
On the face of it, the bottled-water trade makes selling snow to Eskimos sound like a reasonable business proposition.
Tonnes of carbon dioxide are emitted into the atmosphere each year to produce and transport a product thousands of kilometres from Place A to Place B, when an identical product is already available in Place B in a form that is typically much cheaper, rigorously tested and sometimes safer. And afterward, millions of plastic bottles end up in landfills.
A considerable volume of the bottled water bought each year, moreover, is tap water. Popular brands in the US, such as Aquafina and Dasani, for example, may feature mountain peaks and the word "pure" on their labels, but the products are actually tap water that has been put through additional filtration and purification.
An additional irony in buying water shipped thousands of kilometres from places such as Fiji is that large numbers of people who live in those places would give anything to have water of the quality that comes out of developed countries' taps. Fiji Water ships from the South Pacific island nation in distinctive square bottles. In 2007, it shipped the equivalent of 200 million bottles or about 1% of the US market.
Thomas Mooney of Fiji Water says that as of January 1 this year, every bottle is carbon-negative ? meaning the company offsets the greenhouse gases it creates in production and shipping by helping to grow forests and participating in other green initiatives. He says the company is also working to improve drinking water in Fiji villages. "The fact our business exists is why 100 villages this year in Fiji will have clean water," Mooney says. "The underlying assumption is people do not drink Fiji water when they used to drink tap water. People drink Fiji when they used to drink Coke ? so this is a move away from other packaged beverages to a healthier one."
Mooney says Fiji water is different from other brands because it has a different "mouthfeel" ? a term being popularised by the bottled-water industry as it encourages water connoisseurship along the lines of wine connoisseurship.
He describes Fiji as "smooth, silky" and says: "Most other water from Europe has calcium, which is good for your bones but bad for the palate. Water in Fiji is volcanic, so it has less calcium."
Under pressure from environmental groups, however, many institutions and governments are starting to baulk at such pitches.
"By undermining confidence in public drinking water, the bottled-water industry has helped reduce support for repairs and upgrades to public water infrastructure," says environmentalist Elizabeth Royte, author of Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It."People who drank bottled water first drank it because it was chic," Royte says. "But then it went from fashion to fear, and most of the time the fear of water is not well-founded."
People who are worried about the quality of their home and office water supplies can get their water tested and install filters at a small fraction of the financial and environmental costs of bottled water, Royte says.
"There are hundreds of millions spent marketing bottled water as pure and clean and better, and that implies the tap water is not pure and clean and better," she says. "Public utilities do not have PR budgets and do not have money to advertise their wares and tell us their water is pure."
Indiana University's Richard Wilk says water has always been an unusual product. From ancient times, it has been deeply entwined with cultural beliefs; many civilisations have had notions of "holy water".
Decades ago, European colonialists in Africa had water from their homelands shipped to them because they believed that it was the only water that could keep them healthy.
Ironically, today people in Mexico want bottled water from the US, while some Americans prize bottled Penafiel water from Mexico.
And in Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove, a 1964 comedy about nuclear war, General Jack D. Ripper launches a war of mutual annihilation on the Soviet Union because he thinks Communists have undermined the water supply.
What the bottled water industry has done, Wilk argues, is capitalise on two age-old magical beliefs ? that contact with "impure water" can harm you, and that contact with "pure water" can heal you.
"In that sense," he says, "water is a quintessentially magical substance."
Washington Post
First published by TheAge.com.au on August 04 2008
Visit theage.com.au for the latest news updated throughout the day
