Refrigerator Copy
Column published the week of August 8,
2007 www.theleeonline.com © 2007, Lee Ostaszewski
|
Tapped Out |
|
|
By Lee
Ostaszewski You knew it would happen sooner or later. It was only a matter of time before we
experienced bottled-water backlash. I’m not
talking about water cooler bottled water, which has been around since Roman
times, and comes with those cone-shaped paper cups stacked in a dispenser
next to the cooler. The cone cups
never made much sense to me. I mean,
why must I hold my water while I drink it?
Why can’t I set it down if I want to? What I am
talking about are those omnipresent individual-sized bottles of water that
some people seem to carry with them wherever they go, including while taking
a shower. For the
past ten to fifteen years, the general public has had this obsessive need to
hydrate. It has become such a big deal
that holding an individual-sized water bottle in one’s hand has become a
cliché of our times. Forty years from
now when they make movies set in this decade every character, including infants,
will be shown holding a water bottle. The actors
in the future, some not even born yet, will ask the director to explain this
era’s obsession with bottled water and instead of answering, the director
will keel over from dehydration, because in the future there will be no water
left, because we will have drunk it all by then. That won’t
really happen. At least I don’t think
it will. I suppose it could. We are drinking a lot of water. Which nutritionists say is good for us and helps
keep the weight off. Although, I
admit I have difficulty following this logic.
I always remember being told that the human body is made up of 60
percent water. Therefore, wouldn’t
drinking more water actually make us larger?
This could be the key to the entire obesity problem in I first became
aware of the bottled water backlash when I heard reports that a certain bottled
water company does not get its water from a pristine mountain river, as is |
clearly depicted by the picture of a
mountain on its label. Instead, it fills
the bottles with ordinary tap water.
The same tap water that comes out of your kitchen faucet. The same water your dog drinks from the
toilet bowl. Do you feel as though
you’ve been ripped off yet? Oh, but
wait! The company claims it filters
the water first! Doesn’t that make you
feel better? You see, the water is
purified! It is purified tap
water! Some companies even perform
reverse osmosis on the water, although that is still illegal in 37 states
even among consenting adults. So the
government has diverted its attention from the war on terror and the baseball
steroid scandal and is poised to step in and take control of the volatile
bottled water situation. Under public
pressure, the beverage company will now state that the water in its bottles
comes from a public source. The company
should go a step further and also remove the misleading image of a pristine mountain
range from the bottle labels and replace it with a more accurate visual image,
such as a leaky faucet or a rusty town water tower. But the
backlash doesn’t stop with the controversy over the water inside the
bottle. A bigger battle is raging over
the bottles themselves, which have become a major nuisance because there are
so freaking many of them that they threaten to take up more landfill space
than disposable diapers do. There are
five empty bottles on my kitchen counter alone as I type this. Current
estimates predict that by the year 2030 there will be so many empty water
bottles in our landfills each American will be required to drive a garbage
bag full of them across the border into So the
bottom line is that we are bottled-water drinking scum who use precious oil
to make plastic water bottles that, when discarded, crowd our landfills just so
we can pay an outrageous price to drink what is basically filtered tap water. And the reasons we give for doing it: The convenience
and to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Hey, at
least we have rationalization down to an art form. ■ |