Bottle it - the conspiracy that taps into the celebrity in us all
The thing about bottled water is that the more you think about it, the weirder it is. And the more you think about it, the harder it is to justify in common-sense terms.
For a start, the logistical merry-go-round of getting water that might as well have come from the tap, pretty much, into plastic and glass bottles, and then around the world, is mind-boggling. Sometimes a bottle of Buxton mineral water destined for Boston must sail past a New Jersey bottle of Rock Spring water, destination Sheffield, in the mid-Atlantic. Somehow the sort of madnesses that usually mark celebrities out as a different race from the rest of mankind - Raquel Welch, apparently, will only wash her hair in Evian; there are racehorses in America whose trainers think it's normal only to let them drink Arkansas Mountain Valley Spring water; the terribly exclusive Ritz-Carlton in New York has a water sommelier on hand to advise on the right bottle to complement madam's smoked salmon - somehow these insanities have leapt across the chasm that ought to separate us from the stars and entered the everyday.
The other week, four of us had Sunday lunch at a London restaurant. As usual, the drinks bill was higher than that for the food. But when I looked closely, I saw that going on for half of this - £13.50 - was for our water.
My aunt goes one better. She drank water in a Chicago restaurant that was charged at $12 a bottle. The really galling aspect of this was that, once the first bottle was finished, glasses were topped up from a jug of tap water. No one assumed you would pay that ridiculous sum of money twice, or that you'd be able to tell any difference in the taste.
The bottled water industry is huge. Last year, we drank 1,580 million litres of it in the UK. Every year, for the past decade, consumption has risen by 10 per cent - and is forecast to continue to do so for the next five years at least. As the Italians already drink roughly six times the amount that we do per capita, saturation point is considered to be a long way off.
But the really extraordinary figure is this: for the privilege of drinking water that might perhaps be "purer" (whatever that means), or taste a little better because it's from a bottle instead of a tap, we in Britain pay £900m a year. Imagine that in terms of NHS spending. My own experiments show that few ordinary people can even tell tap from mineral water in a blind tasting, so unless you're drinking the carbonated stuff (which, statistically, we are doing only 18 per cent of the time), there is absolutely no justification for it.
It does make you think that perhaps bottled water might be the most pretentious waste of money, not to mention natural resources, ever. Naturally, I'm a fine one to talk, because it's only six months since I was brushing my teeth and filling the kettle with Vittel. But that was because I was frightened of the terrorists. Now I've come to wonder if there isn't some other sort of conspiracy. In restaurants, waiters will always try to out-psyche you by making you repeat any request for tap water at least three times, always loudly enough to be heard on the other side of the street, before they will deign to serve it.
Magazines and newspapers are full of health propaganda about drinking water, much of it peddled via PR in the form of surveys and studies, on behalf of the water companies. Bottled has become, somehow, quite the only modern thing to do.
It's not such a different mentality from that of the desperate working classes of two or three hundred years ago who would buy phials of liquid, believing it would transform their dim, stuttering child into a genius. The amazing thing is that, in this supposedly educated age, we still fall for it.
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