However, there is the perception that tap water 'tastes funny' and this drives the industry in its marketing of a product that Barnett views a kind of modern form of patent medicine -- it is at best needlessly expensive and harmless to the drinker, at worst destructive to the ecosystem (Barnett 139). In fact, there is a kind of circular irony -- the more bottlers are allowed to exploit the environment, the worse the press about water quality and the more people are inclined to purchase bottled water, thus raising the sales of the industry that is complicit in such destruction. Companies are not even charged for "the groundwater from which they profit" (Barnett 142)
The lack of concern amongst the water-drinking public may have to do with water's ubiquity -- every day we ignore the tap near our kitchen sink, buy bottled water, and carelessly discard that water because we believe the bottles are recycled. And, as Peter Gleick argues in his essay "Selling bottled water: The modern medicine show" from Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water, people are bombarded with advertisements for the health claims of bottled water so consistently, the effect is very similar to how people react to prescription drug advertisements -- suddenly, subliminally, they sense that they have a 'condition'...
Skinny water, ionized water, alkalized water: people understand very little about these claims but assume because they sound scientific they must be true (Gleick 114). And once again, the
FDA is more interested in seemingly obviously false claims by drug and supplement manufacturers than the claims of water bottlers. Consumers seem eager to believe that just by
drinking water they can magically improve their health: manufacturers have even claimed that they can "rearrange" the molecular structure to improve consumer health and profited from it (Gleick 123).
Both authors make a persuasive case for the need for an educated consumer. Although Barnett and Gleick call for greater regulation, they also make it clear that consumer buying habits need to shift for meaningful change to take place regarding the regulation of what has become a massive business. Quite simply, bottled water is not good for consumer health (at worst, it can be harmful and is bad for the environment in terms of resource depletion and the growing pile of recycled materials produced by the industry (since not all bottles are recycled and even the recycling industry produces some waste). This eventually affects the public's health in a negative fashion. "Ignorance and fear" has allowed the industry to profit off of consumers and also allowed it to actually harm human health (Gleick 130).
Works Cited
Barnett, Cynthia. Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S. Ann Arbor, MI:
University of Michigan Press, 2009.
Gleick, Peter. Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water.
Island Press, 2011.
