Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [17]
Today, the tap is alien to today’s youth, who’ve grown up thinking water comes in bottles, taps aren’t for drinking, and fountains equal filth. Kids like having their hands on a personal water bottle, but they have no interest in washing that bottle out, to be reused another day, or otherwise taking responsibility for their waste.
Stores selling water are on every corner, while drinking fountains or restaurants happy to fill a glass for free are increasingly rare. “As refillables were phased out, as technology developed to enable single-serving plastic bottles, and as industry marketing efforts were ramped up,” CRI reports, “packaged beverage consumption grew and grew.” The success of portable water in the nineties hinged on the mind-set, established in the seventies and eighties, that it was okay to buy—and then toss—single servings of soda while on the go. In 2006, Americans consumed an average of 686 single-serve beverages per person per year; in 2007 we collectively drank fifty billion single-serve bottles of water alone. An entire generation is growing up with the idea that drinking water comes in small plastic bottles. Indeed, committed tap-water drinkers are far more likely to be older than devoted bottled-water drinkers.
Like iPods and cell phones, bottled water is private, portable, and individual. It’s factory-sealed and untouched by human hands—a far cry from the public water fountain. (Fiji exploits this subliminal germophobia with its slogan “Untouched by Man,” as does a company called Ice Rocks that sells “hygienic ice cubes”—springwater hermetically packaged in disposable plastic.) Somehow, we’ve become a nation obsessed with hygiene and sterility. Never, outside of an epidemic, have we been more afraid of our own bodies. Supermarkets provide antibacterial wipes for shopping cart handles. Passengers bring their own linens to cover airline pillows. Supermarkets wrap ears of corn in plastic: corn still in its husk! (The downside, besides mountains of waste, is the development of superresistant bacteria immune to most of the commonly used antibiotics.)
In Consumed: How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole, Benjamin Barber argues that consumer culture has turned adult citizens into children by catering to our narcissistic desires and conditioning us to passionately embrace certain brands and products as a necessary part of our lifestyles. Is it narcissism that pulls people into stores the second they feel thirsty? Or is it a need for emotional succor? City dwellers walk down the street swigging; they stand in conversation and mark time with discreet sips. You see it in lines at the movies and in cars on the freeway. (But only in the United States, Mascha says. “In Europe, no one walks down the street sucking on a bottle of water. We wait and we have a nice meal.”) Surely these people have access to water at the end of their journey and are in no danger of desiccating on the spot. No, this is water bottle as security blanket.
It doesn’t take Mascha long to realize he is walking into the belly of the beast, drinking bottled water with me. On the phone before we met, I admitted I knew nothing about “fine waters,” let alone the cheap stuff. I consumed none of the 27.6 gallons that the average American drinks annually, and I felt like an ostentatious jerk buying all that fancy stuff for my meeting with Mascha. I’d never even tasted Poland Spring until my first visit with Tom Brennan in Hollis, Maine. We’d been talking in the conference room when plant manager Bill Maples swept in bearing swag for all: eight-ounce bottles of water. I had my own, I said to Maples in what I hoped was a jocular tone, and pulled out my Nalgene, a wide-mouthed bottle made of polycarbonate plastic. I’d filled it that morning from a sink in Yarmouth, Maine, which has excellent water.
Maples handed me a bottle anyway and snapped his open. I unscrewed the blue top of my Nalgene. In this