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Michael considered fate at 19:01   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

While bottled water is a $9 billion dollar industry in the US alone and many New Yorkers drink bottled water because they say it "tastes better", an ABC 20/20 blind taste test (yes, I see the pun-rificness there) nevertheless found that good 'ol tap water is no worse:

"20/20" took five bottles of national brands of bottled water and a sample of tap water from a drinking fountain in the middle of New York City and sent them to microbiologist Aaron Margolin of the University of New Hampshire to test for bacteria that can make you sick, like e. coli.

"There was actually no difference between the New York City tap water and the bottled waters that we evaluated," he said..

.. We ran a taste test, offering people New York City tap water and five other bottled waters, Evian, the top-selling bottled water Aquafina, Poland Spring, Iceland Spring (which comes all the way from Iceland), and American Fare, a discount brand from Kmart, which sells for less than half the price of Evian..

.. We asked people to rate the waters as bad, average or great. Lots of people said one of the waters was particularly bad. Was that the tap water? No. Tap water did pretty well. Even people who said they don't like it, liked it on the blind test.

In our test of bottled waters, Kmart's American Fare — the cheapest brand — won..

.. in last place, by far, with almost half the testers saying it tasted bad, was the most expensive water — the fancy French stuff, Evian.

"It tasted like toilet water," one man said.

From the comments of the Treehugger.com reference post:

"In 2003, Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, a Showtime television network program, conducted an informal taste test of bottled water. They found about 75 percent of New Yorkers preferred tap water to bottled waters.."

Sadly, my own mother insists that having bottled water is helpful because it provides an easy way to "carry water around the house"... uhhh, you mean like a glass??

In somewhat related news, is oxygen the next free commodity they'll bottle up and convince people to buy? There are already oxygen bars..