“Pop Culture in a Bottle” - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 258

“A TRAIN SPEEDING OVER A CLIFF”
Bottled water can cost between 240 and 10,000 times as much as tap water , the Natural
Resources Defense Council (NRDC) found. Bottled water even costs more per gallon
than gasoline, as Gustave Leven, the former chairman of Perrier, noted with satisfac-
tion: “ It struck me that all you had to do was take the water out of the ground and sell it
for more than the price of wine, milk—or, for that matter, oil.”
A 2005 study by the World Wildlife Fund discovered that a $2.50 bottle of water
shipped from a “pure European aquifer” is no healthier or tastier than water from a city
faucet. While providers of public water, which are overseen by the EPA, are required to
post the bacteriological and chemical content of their water, producers of bottled wa-
ter—which is considered a “food product” and is overseen by the Food and Drug Ad-
ministration—are not required to list such information on their labels. Many bottled
waters have labels, but they list things such as “Zero grams of fat, cholesterol, sodium,
carbohydrates, dietary fiber, sugars, protein, vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, and iron.”
This is not only meaningless and unhelpful, it's confusing to the consumer.
In France or Italy, water is prized for what minerals are in it; in the United States, we
prize water for what is not in it. All waters (except distilled water, which is not healthful
to drink) contain some minerals, such as naturally occurring salts. Minerals give wa-
ter its distinctive flavor. In Europe, each brand of “mineral water” proudly proclaims a
specific taste, mineral content, laxative power, level of calcium (which helps strengthen
bones), and so on. he FDA allows bottlers to say that an American springwater has
“0 sodium,” which is not accurate. In an effort to feed their children the “purest” food
available, some parents mix bottled water with infant formula, unaware that the high
mineral content of certain bottled waters makes them unsuitable for infants, or the eld-
erly.
The FDA also does not require bottlers to explain where the water comes from, how
the water was purified, the results of water-quality testing, or where such information
might be found. There is virtually no oversight of the design of water labels, which usu-
ally feature a misty grotto, a snowy peak, or a dense rain forest—images that conjure
up pristine aquifers far removed from polluting civilization—when in fact the water is
taken from municipal supplies, e.g., the taps of non-Alpine Los Angeles, New York, or
Texas.
Questions about the purity and source of certain bottled waters have occasionally led
to a loss of consumer confidence. In 1990, Perrier was found to contain excess benzene,
which led to a costly and embarrassing recall. Other bottled waters have been found
to contain mold, algae, glass, fecal coliforms, and—in Texas in 1994— crickets . In 2007,