WASHINGTON, April 9 (UPI) -- Now that "food flyer miles" has become the latest catchphrase in the lexicon of the socially aware foodie, bottled water is in for a hard time.
It has been banned recently from Chez Panisse, the Berkeley, Calif., "mother" restaurant for all those responsible ideologies like seasonality, sustainability and local sourcing. And other restaurants are following suit, bringing jugs of water from the faucet to the table. It looks like the old days may be over when we had to decide not only what wine we wanted, but whether our water should be flat or fizzy, French, German or Italian, or drawn from some bijou spring somewhere in our own deepest countryside.
The Brits won't mind -- they're used to it. They discovered three years ago that some of the bottled water they were consuming had come, in fact, straight from the municipal faucet. Coca-Cola filled its Dasani brand from taps in a suburb just outside London. They needn't have traveled from the city at all. London tap water is just as drinkable.
It's believed as much as 40 percent or more of U.S. bottled water sold in supermarkets and vending machines, particularly of the carbonated variety, could come from the faucet.
If this new move spreads, what will become of bars such as Colette in Paris, which only serves water?
There, depending on what you decide to eat, the waiter will recommend an appropriate eau from around 60 on the menu.
At the Water Bar in Philadelphia, a bottle of water can cost as much as $50. A 750-milliliter bottle of Bling H20 costs $40 and up, depending on where you buy it. It's not a water you'd want to pour into a glass. Most of the price goes into its limited edition bottle that has its brand name spelled out in Swarovski crystals, with some more Swarovski twinkle hanging from a chain round its neck. Apparently, Paris Hilton's dog loves it.
Like coffee, it's amazing how much money people are prepared to pay for something that once was so cheap, or, in the case of water, free. But ever since we learned we were expected to drink 8 glasses of water a day to keep hydrated -- a figure that for any other liquid would amount to binge drinking -- we've been knocking back plain H2O in bottles.
We do this despite those simple home filters available on the market. Enthusiastic joggers and gym devotees don't tend to fill the sports bottles -- to which they seem to be joined at the wrist -- with the simple elixir they could pour from a filter jug.
Foreigners eating out in America's restaurants in the Era Before Bottled Water were always impressed to have a waiter show up with an iced pitcher almost before they had settled themselves on their seats.
This new control of bottled water is just another example of this extraordinary phenomenon of private individuals and businesses acting on environmental policy where government doesn't seem to want to. If not buying bottled water means fewer food flyer miles and less burden upon landfills, great.
It's not so great, of course, for those whose business it is to sell pure spring water. Going in search of the stuff, often horribly sulfuric, is nothing new. The aristocracy and gentry all across Europe used to travel to "take the waters" for the purification of their constitutions, at spa towns from Bath in England (read any Jane Austen) to Baden-Baden in Germany.
The Food and Drug Administration regards bottled water as a food, so it is regulated. However, since up to 70 percent is packaged and sold within the same state, it is exempt from FDA regulation. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulates tap water. They both test water for contaminants.
The nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council has done tests on 1,000 bottles of 103 different brands of bottled water, and discovered arsenic, bacteria and manmade chemicals in 22 percent of them.
Trace amounts of contaminants like these are unlikely, however, to harm anyone in good health. But perhaps we'll just have to stick to a loaf of bread, a glass of wine and no plastic bottles beside us in the wilderness.
Masters of the ancient Chinese tea ceremony take their water very seriously. They look for natural or bottled spring water, to give a certain "body" of flavor to the tea. While the boiling temperature of the water depends on what type of tea leaf is being used, in general the advice for regular supermarket tea is not to allow it to come to a rolling boil, because that kills the oxygen content of the water and flattens its taste.
