It’s about time.  When a restaurant like Chez Panisse (or any member of the myriad of wonderful progeny that’s sprung up in its wake) believes that the best water it can serve comes from Fiji, Italy, or the French Alps, something’s wrong. 

According to an article that appeared in the Independent a few months ago, bottled water costs from 240 to 10,000 times more to produce than tap water.  Plastic bottles can take one thousand years to biodegrade, and that’s not counting the expense of the fossil fuel needed to transport water from its artesian well to your dinner table.  One Finnish company sent 1.4 million bottles of tap water from Helsinki to Saudi Arabia. 

In America, we spend more than $10,000 a minute for water.  On top of that, producing one kilo of PET plastic, the kind that gets used to make the bottles that store the water, uses 17.5 kg of water.  Water’s a renewable resource, but that’s no reason for wanton waste.

The NRDC did a four-year study of the bottled water industry and ended up with a boatload of conclusions. 

I love this one:  “One brand of water discussed in this report was sold as ‘spring water’ and its label showed a lake and mountains in the background—with the FDA’s explicit blessing.  But until recently the water actually came from a periodically contaminated well in an industrial facility’s parking lot, near a waste dump.  Another brand of water sold with a label stating it is ‘pure glacier water’ actually came from a public water supply.” 

Incredibly, none of these examples broke any rules; they were just exploiting loopholes.  As we’ve seen with the debates of over the significance of organic labeling, semantics matter whether you’re talking about organic tomatoes grown in China for Wal-Mart (and then transported 7,000 miles to America) or artesian Fiji water flown from Viti Levu to Jean-Georges in New York.  Fiji’s promotional material even states “When it comes to drinking water, ‘remote’ happens to be very, very good.  [The] very distance is part of what makes us so much more pure and so much healthier than other bottled waters.” 

Are you sure?

Nathalie Jordi's appetites keep her bouncing between between County Cork, New York, London and the French Alps.  When not slinging curd or interviewing farmers, she writes for Travel&Leisure, Conde Nast Traveler, Gastronomica, and her blog at www.autobiogeography.com.  Her dreams of a life spent baking, drinking margaritas, and sitting in the sun are gathering steam during her current stint as a waitress in New York City.