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Welcome to Your Daily Dot where Dot will share tips, advice, and stories on how we can make our world better.
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Dear Reader,
I came of age at a time when paying good money for water in a bottle seemed like lunacy, if we thought of it at all. Water fountains were plentiful, and we had yet to be indoctrinated into the “eight glasses of water a day is akin to the fountain of youth” cult. My friend Carmen spritzed herself on the beach with Evian from a metal spray bottle, but Carmen’s parents were European, so expensive French water seemed her birthright (though not for the rest of us proletariat).
But there’s little question that convincing North Americans (most of whom — not all; looking at you Flint, Michigan — have perfectly potable tap water) to pay hard cash for filtered water in plastic bottles is perhaps the greatest swindle of all.
But it’s not just bottled tap water; it’s artisanal water, it’s #icebling, it’s Stanley Cups. Water, it turns out, is big business.
The Guardian reports: “Water is the simplest thing we consume and
perhaps the only one that is truly essential, since without it, life cannot exist. The fact that a quarter of the world does not have access to clean, fresh water ought to be a more urgent priority. But it seems there is something in our hypermodern capitalist mindset that simply cannot countenance a product so free, egalitarian — and boring. So we have to come up with ways of making even tap water aspirational, exclusive and, above all, expensive.”
Thirsty for more? Keep reading. It’s enough to make you grateful
for your tap. Speaking of which, Bluedot Martha’s Vineyard reports on an initiative to remind people that quenching their thirst is just a matter of knowing where to find the nearest spigot.
Saturatedly,
Dot
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