Core77

After just posting a rather lengthy sustainability diatribe, reviewing Elizabeth Royte's Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It seems a little like environmental overkill, but her work is as much a classic David and Goliath adventure as it is a polemic. She opens with an interview with Dr. Michael Mascha, a self-proclaimed bottled water connoisseur, who advocates the careful pairing of pedigreed ground and glacier waters from around the world with meals during fine dining. While it would seem that such rampant consumerism virtually guarantees he's to be the easiest target in the book, the truth is a little more complicated.

Framing her narrative against the struggle between the locals of Fryeburg, Maine with the Poland Spring company (now owned by Nestle!), Bottlemania explains the drawbacks and advantages of gathering water from a variety of sources. Hint: they all have downsides. The flavors that Mascha's sophisticated palate can discern between relatively pure glacier water and mineral rich springs are anything but water. Instead they are dissolved solids -- read impurities -- and carbon dioxide that effervesces out of the water when pressure is relieved. Some of these mineral waters contain alarming quantities of heavy metals or other toxic impurities, often more than the federal guidelines allow.

A close enough examination of almost any field or business can set off environmental alarm bells, but what's amazingly peculiar about bottled water is that our own natural desires for health and prosperity have somehow been co-opted into paying money for something we can get for free, or nearly free. Amazingly, while Mascha's hyper-elitist attraction to obscure cave drippings from foreign countries is clearly wastefully obsessive, it might be just be more rational than the growing trend of purchasing repackaged tap-water from the municipality next to you. In any problem this large and complex, there are no easy answers, and Bottlemania should leave most readers with as many questions as answers. I would also hope, however, that readers realize that the problems it poses are far more universal than just fixating on Nestle's Poland Spring, Coke's Dasani, or Pepsi's Aquafina. The David and Goliath story of one individual fighting against an "evil corporation" is an old American literary theme. Royte's factual account is about as engrossing as any Grisham thriller. Perhaps this summer a few of us should give reality a page-turning try.