BOTTLE BATTLE
Because it is in a colorfully labeled bottle, water is thought to be much better for drinking purposes is thought, by many people tolday, to be the very best..It is, when so packaged, said to be better than water anywhere in anything, or flowing free from a pristine spring or fountain in a woodland far removed from all human contamination. Even under such perfect conditions, it can't be that good.
Citizens who used to take great civic pride in their efficient city water system, now find it better to buy all their drinking water in neat little plastic bottles than to drinking commonly from a tap or public water fountain. People spout endless aphorism about ?purity?, ?maintaining good health, and do lengthy condemantions of ?contaminants? of many kinds and their levels of viciousness. And they work at such studies until they arrive at some point which seems to justify buying and selling water in a glittering array of plastic containers as a special advantages. It didn't take long for some enterprisng individuals to discover that they could make a better living selling water than they could selling food. Soft drink distributors found it to be worth their while to send delivery trucks along their soda beverage routes for those drinkers who now consume bought supplies of bottled water without any foreseeable limit
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One trucking company, which was having a difficult time making a living hauling freight commercially, also had trouble with a spring flooding their parking lot. They started bottling the overflow of the offending tar-covered wellspring until health officials questioned the source of their ?sweet, pure water from natural springs? and put out a ?cease and no-no? order which turned their bottled water source off. By that time, they were well established, it is said, and contracted for water supplies from various other sources .- all. ?springs?, of course, and all ?natural? and from other locations than under their parking area.
The local city water supply system delivers water to their homes through a modern system of secure pipes and they treat the water with purifying chlorine to kill and disease bearing microorganisms, fluoride to prevent dental problems and water softeners to reduce hardness to less than one hundred parts per million. All of that can be important to those persons who - young or old ? are in any way immuno-compromised by such maladies as cancer, treated with chemotherapy; people who have HIV/AIDS and other such immune systems disorders, old or young alike, anyone at risk from infections.
If you should need it your water supply system has cryptosporidium and other such microbials available for you. They are health providers in the total sense of the term rather than mere bottlers of water.
I suppose we ought to be thankful as a nation that the craze has centered on aqua pura rather on one of the fermented liquids.
If you find yourself being excluded socially because you are not sipping on a colorful bottle, buy a few and keep them filled with tap water.
You would find that's what more and more of your in-style friends are already doing.
A.L.M. July 11, 2004 [c533wds]
