Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Big Outrage
Salon, your instructional guide to your daily outrage over the imperfectability of mankind – sorry, sorry, humankind! Sexism! It’s so institutional! – had a piece about how Big Beverage forced you to pay a lot of money for bottled water. (Since the industry has Big in its name, you know you’re supposed to boo and hiss, unless it’s Big Government, in which case you should fall to your knees so fast you crack the marble.) Bottled water isn’t any better than good ol’ municipal water, so you’ve been swindled with booshwa, and paid dearly for your ignorance. Big Bev compelled you to waste your money with marketing and advertising, and like most people whose brains are shallow dishes of agar waiting for the implantation of capitalism’s horrid spores, you went right along.
Well. Let’s take a look at the target market for bottled water. For the most part, people who fret about Toxins Toxins Everywhere, and prefer their produce to have been banked with night soil instead of pesticides, and abhor anything that has been genetically modified. They regard drinking tap water as the equivalent of Tchaikovsky drinking from a stagnant pail during a cholera epidemic, and besides: if the bottle says FIJI WATER it’s a sign to everyone else that you’re the sort of person who would like to go to exotic places, providing the tour operators paid the locals a living wage and contributed 10% of their profits to saving the reefs, somewhere.
In other words, the Salon audience.
I am unable to gin up the outrage over other people paying a lot of money for cleverly packaged water. Today in the grocery store with my daughter I tried to strike a balance between admiring the varieties offered, the talent involved in the label design, and counseling her to resist Fancified Water for the sake of fiscal probity. On the other hand, I bought her a bottle of the stuff once because she was besotted by the bottle’s shape, and even though she reused it over and over I can imagine the Salon writer clucking in disapproval.
The other day I was recommending a Keurig K-cup-type coffee pod that made the best damned cup of coffee I’ve ever had, only to learn that my interlocutor didn’t have a Keurig because she couldn’t live with the guilt of the waste the cups produced. “Well, that’s just one of the reasons I like them,” I said, but pointed out how these were special pods that had 42% less plastic. Can they be composted? Well, if you want to rip them open and dump the tiny amount of grounds into your Filth Bin, sure.
To be on the left these days seems to be an unending series of scrapes and abrasions, with every manifestation of American culture giving offense. Question: what will it take to make them happy? Banning plastic water bottles and K-cups is just the start, of course.
Published in Culture
The composting idea is driving me nuts. We are literally creating a public health disaster.
Maybe this is the best reason to not compost the old people too soon because they remember Germs.
Hypothesis: Gasoline doesn’t need to be purified for human consumption, and that process can be rather expensive.
Most of the bottled water is filtered and de-chlorinated tap water. If you are buying a Coke or Pepsi bottled water it probably comes from a municipal source relatively near to you. However, if you are buying an off brand in those large 24 packs from a discount store, that water comes from farther away and generally from a water source that is pretty good (I have noticed Michigan is a pretty common source for these off brands). The funny thing about ground water is that that the less scarce it is generally the better quality it is. That is why places like New Mexico, which has very little ground water resources has terrible ground water quality, but places like Michigan which has tons of groundwater has very high quality groundwater.
If you are looking for high quality municipal water you can’t beat Ryan M’s hometown of Lewistown, MT. By my judgement it is the best tasting water I have ever had.
It is rumored that the local bottled water company simply fills directly out of the tap. Yes, the best water in the country. :)
In my office, the bottles for the water coolers are filled up from the tap in the basement.
Cold water usually tastes better than water straight-from-the-tap. As such, simply refrigerating the water often makes people believe it’s special.
Supposedly, that’s the main effect of the Brita water filter. It’s not so much that filtered water tastes better, but rather the simple fact that people keep their Brita water pitcher in the fridge.
I sometimes wonder why a water company does not bottle from a well or spring that has great tasting water and charge a premium. Maybe it has to do with regulations but to me if you have well water that is in from spring that taste outstanding, sell it for drinking.
Your kids should start a water stand in a populated area that has city water. They could easily get away selling a gallon of water for $10 or $20 bucks if the water had the right combination of minerals that made it taste outstanding (assuming they gave free sample taste to hook the customers).
I was actually surprised a month or two ago I found a bottle water brand that actually was a lot better than everything else. It was as good if not better than what the best home water filter systems produce.
Ha! They are anhedonics, and are incapable of happiness! It’s a paradox! Tricksy, tricksy, Mr. Lileks.
So it was “Big Bev” that’s been spreading all of the Chicken Little stories of environmental contamination over the past 50 years? Did “Big Bev” write Silent Spring? Is “Big Bev” really behind the Sierra Club?
Even when leftists are misled by other leftists, they find a way to blame capitalism. Pathetic.
Gasoline has to be refined from what comes out of the ground – a comparably (if not more) expensive process.
“I was actually surprised a month or two ago I found a bottle water brand that actually was a lot better than everything else. It was as good if not better than what the best home water filter systems produce.”
I would be very skeptical about that if it weren’t for this. Water to me tastes like water except when it doesn’t. That is also true for milk. Several years ago I was buying a carton of skim milk and as I reached for the Pet milk a man stocking the Mayfield milk display handed me a Mayfield carton and said “Here, I guarantee you will taste the difference.” He was right and I have been a fan of Mayfield products ever since.
of course, your first problem was that it was skim milk. Switch to whole milk and you’ll also immediately taste the difference. Especially if it is good whole milk. Raw milk is also tasty, but not worth the 11$ price tag.
And in some places, selling it is illegal.
Cameronscoffee.com, Intense French. It’s gooooood.
That’s rare, sounds like an intellectually honest guy.
That’s pretty Rico-gay.
“I was actually surprised a month or two ago I found a bottle water brand that actually was a lot better than everything else. It was as good if not better than what the best home water filter systems produce.”
There are different recipes. 95% of the water comes from municipal sources (someone mentioned this above). The processing removes the chlorination but also the minerals that provide the “taste”. Most makers put minerals back in after processing which accounts for some of the difference. What’s interesting now is that the water market is segmenting. Witness the introduction of flavors and vitamins.
Thank you sir.
I have purchased some thru the Amazon link on the site. Thanks for the tip.