Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [19]
We’re pouring smallish portions and dumping what we don’t want onto the Bryant Park plantings, feeding Old World rain to the rootlets of New World shrubs. I decant a few inches of Iceberg water into Mascha’s glass. “Classic rainwater,” he says, after a quick sip. It too has a low TDS. Mascha isn’t a fan. Icebergs contain a gazillion layers of compressed snow, some of which fell during the Industrial Revolution, when the air over cities was black with soot, and some during the 1950s, when atomic tests put radioactive particles into the atmosphere. Iceberg water is made by chunking off bits of berg using a crane, then crushing, melting, and storing it in a tank inside a barge.
Mascha seems to be fading: perhaps he is waterlogged. It’s time to open the mystery bottle. I crack the top and pour a little into our glasses. “You go first,” he jokes. I do; then he sips and asks, cocking his head, “Is this distilled?”
“Um, no, I don’t think so,” I say. “But it’s been through several other processes.” I wait for Mascha to try another sip, to offer some expert insight.
“It’s not Le Bleu, is it? Le Bleu is triple-distilled.”
“Nope,” I say. Mascha seems uninterested in taking another taste, or in further speculation. So I reveal, “Actually, this stuff is bottled at a wastewater treatment plant in Singapore. They run the effluent through all kinds of microfilters and reverse osmosis and then treat it with UV light. They call it NEWater.”
Mascha gives me an odd look.
“So what do you think?” I say.
“I’m feeling a little queasy.”
“I think it smells musty,” I offer. He sniffs his glass, shrugs, and sniffs mine. He isn’t getting musty from the water. “Another sip?” I say. He shakes his head vehemently.
“People taste water and they use all this flowery description,” he says. “A week later they drink the same water and they think it tastes different. These are not repeatable experiences: it’s the same with wine.” Humans rely on many cues when they taste, he continues, which is why a product’s story is so important. He doesn’t have NEWater’s story, and so he says nothing. Later, I give him a bit more of its story—Singapore’s ultra-treated wastewater is mixed in a reservoir with freshwater in a ratio of one to ninety-nine, and it seems to sit quite well with Singaporeans who drink it daily from the tap. I got my bottle of NEWater from a friend who’d recently toured the plant, where they give away samples of the stuff uncut with any freshwater: it’s 100 percent reclaimed. Armed with this knowledge, Mascha still dismisses the product as “unexciting.”
“Are you kidding?” I nearly shout. The story has technology, psychology, politics. It comes from a country so enthralled with order that it fines citizens for jaywalking, spitting, and failing to properly flush the toilet. It galls me that Mascha prefers a water like Bling—which comes in a corked bottle decorated with Swarovski crystals. Three quarters of a liter sells for forty dollars in stores or ninety dollars at nightclubs.
“Bling is extremely interesting,” Mascha asserts. “The water is from English Mountain spring in Tennessee, but the bottle is the main event. It personifies Miami, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. It shows that water can be as desirable as a bottle of Cristal champagne. You go to a club, you order Bling to impress your underage girlfriend.” He insists Bling has terroir, because it has contact with geological features, but he won’t admit that NEWater, which has contact with millions of Singaporeans, has an equally exciting story.
I give up: Mascha will never see it my way.
By now I’m getting a sense of why bottled water has become such a success in this country. Marketing persuaded Americans that the store-bought stuff was natural and pure, which complemented our ideas about personal well-being. We were convinced that if you cared about your