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The Great Aquafina Joke--It's Tap Water!

Posted Jul 27th 2007 5:14PM by Dinesh D'Souza
Filed under: Nutrition, Comedy, Bizarre

People will buy anything! Set up a stand near Central Park in New York and offer people bags of "fresh air from the Alps" and you are sure to find suckers willing to pay you a few bucks for it.

Somehow in the last few years our family has joined the national trend of people purchasing water. Last year sales of bottled water were in excess of 2.6 billion cases costing around $15 billion. I'm sure my parents would laugh at the idea, and future generations will probably also guffaw at the stupidity of it. But today we all seem convinced that bottled water is somehow better than tap water. Evian. Perrier. Pellegrino. How ravishing it seems to be drinking water not from the good old faucet but from some Elysian spring in the French mountains or the Italian countryside, untouched by technology and grubby human hands. Of course we never think of what happens to that water as it gets bottled and stored and transported over thousands of miles. We don't think of botled water as water that someone got from some unidentified rivulet several weeks ago.

Now Aquafina has exposed our illusion that bottled water comes from a more elevated source than tap water by revealing that its bottled water is, in fact, drawn from tap water. A spokesman for the company says Aquafina botles will in future "clarify" this fact for discerning bottle readers. Yet industry observers say that the new revelation shouldn't make much of a difference. "Consumers have an affection for bottled water," writers John Sicher of Beverage Digest. "It's not an issue of taste or health, it's about convenience." I find this to be a ridiculous statement. Why on earth would people buy bottled water at the airport, for example, when there are water fountains outside every restroom? I suspect that if people know they were getting pretty much the same thing in the bottle, they would start to feel very foolish.

As for me, no more Aquafina. I'm going back to Chardonnay.

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