Whats your take on bottled water? Sad over-priced sign of the times (we’re selling water for god’s sake!)? Or smart quality product?
I’m right smack on the fence with this one. In North America atleast, theres not really anything wrong with tap water, its certainly not pleasant to drink, but its more than drinkable. That pepsi brand water is garbage, where as evian really is nice water, if you can afford it.
Kinda funny how on one hand we’ve progressed to recycing everything over the last 10 years, but on the other, we bottle our water.
I drink bottled water. It’s the cheapest you can buy, and it’s actually just filtered Fort Worth city water. But it definitely tastes better, and at the price I buy it at, it’s not any more expensive than buying a filter for the faucet. Until we can get a whole-house filter, we’ll keep buying water.
Well, in some areas, you must buy your own water-I went to a friend’s camp (an old farmhouse) in an area where you could not drink the water, because you’d get amoebas and things like that. You had to bring your own along.
Plus, I CAN taste the difference. Our tap water tastes a wee bit metallic. My aunt’s tastes like sulfur because they still have well water.
I’ve drank tap water for as long as I can remember. The stuff here isn’t that bad, though I didn’t really like Calgary water. There at least my Mom has a Brita filter so we always used that.
If I’m wandering around and there is no water fountain handy (like at school or the mall) I’ll usually buy a cheap bottle of water. Never even seen the pepsi stuff, but I just usually buy the drugstore water. It is generally 60 cents a bottle and quenches my thirst just fine.
Otherwise I’ll just carry a water bottle for myself, filled with tap water from home.
When I lived in Las Vegas a few years ago, the water had a very mineral-y taste to it (not in a good way). Almost everyone I knew drank bottled water there.
Personally I like that bottled water is so readily available - I don’t drink a lot of soda anyway and sometimes nothing quenches your thirst the way water does. I don’t like overly sweet soda or juice.
Evian tastes like pool water to me; I prefer Dasani (it’s by Coca-Cola Co, btw). And I don’t mind paying for bottled water because I realize that it costs to filter it, package it & ship it.
LA water smells of chlorine and is not to be ingested. I’ve always had Arrowhead water delivered.
Evian is indeed a lovely water, probably the mildest and most pleasant tasting bottled water available. On the other end of the spectrum, Aquafina is just horrific, and the commercials (“It’s NOTHING! We promise… NOTHING!” – hooray, $1-per-bottle nothingness) grate my nerves.
My whole family drinks bottled water. Hell, even my dog drinks bottled water.
Our tap water is repulsive. Smelly, foul-tasting, and according to an EPA report which I found taped to my door one day, full of fecal bacteria. Every time I have drank it, I’ve been very sick to the stomach, thus we purchased a water cooler, and have those big blue bottles delivered once a week.
When hubby and I travel, I fill bottles with our water-cooler water to drink while in the hotel. I’ve found that tap water greatly varies, and if in a city that has horrible water, I’m grateful I brought my own.
I don’t like buying those little bottles of water from convenience stores: much too expensive, and a lot of it (according to Consumer Reports) is just bottled tap water, anyway.
At home, I drink reg’lar water, filtered through my fridge system. It seems cleaner than tap, or at least I believe it is. On the road, I’ll buy the bottled stuff just 'cos it’s better than drinking from the gas station water hose.
I was lucky enough to grow up in NYC, where the water (except for a little bit of Queens, I think) comes from a venerable engineering marvel of a system that does a pretty good job of producting water that’s not only safe but tastes so good that there was a time in the early nineties that IT was sold as bottled water!
Not until I lived in the Boston area for a while did I understand the appeal of bottled water for some people. Sometimes there were times when I drank it for the taste when the algae blooms were going on, although I knew it was safe and fine for showering, cooking, etc.
But I did work for a govt. consumer affairs office for a while, and had to tell several people that MA, at least, did no testing or anything of bottled water, and that the state set no standards for it, so caveat emptor, folks. Now, this was the late 90s in one state and maybe things have changed, but I can tell you that there’s probably no water that’s as tested and scrutinzed as water from a public watershed. The water from these bottlers, well…I’m sure they don’t want to kill/get sued by their customers, but they are sort of on their own.
So, if your local water tastes like the pipes it came out, don’t panic–you’re not going to get sick from it unless things go very very wrong. Drink bottled if you like. But if you’re drinking it because oooh, tap water is unsafe and the gummint isn’t telling us, well, get your tinfoil hat and make the bottlers rich. Er. And paying for a nice label or pretty bottle shape is just d-u-m dumb.
Just a quick BTW to people like Lissa; even these days, some public water supplies may NOT be that safe, and I didn’t mean to imply that nobody should drink the bottled. Some folks may legitimately need to, and that’s fine.
I was just saying that the bottled water industry isn’t that well regulated AFAIK so don’t believe the hype. And if you’re going to buy a Brita filter and you don’t have obvious, Lissa-like problems with your water, your local DEP should be able to send you a detailed report on where your water comes from and what’s in it.
Boy, if only I had water from a city. I live where some people may call the “sticks” or what not, but its really only five minutes away from my school… Anyway, I have lived off of well water for a long long time. Not for drinking, but for showering and washing of hands. When I was young I drank water from the faucet but as I grew I progressed towards bottled water. We used to get those giant 10 gallon or what not water jug things and use that, but lately it’s been bottled water because the family drinks other stuff now (soda, milk, Hawaiin Punch, beer, etc.). So, for me, its bottled water.
The water source for our house is a well. The water tastes good. No flavor at all, in fact, and nobody, guests included, has ever had a health problem because of the well water.
We drink it from the tap, and if we’re going out and think we’ll need a bottle of water, we bring it from home.
Pay money for a bottle of water??? Haven’t yet, and not likely to.
Nobody in our house has, as far as we know, been sick from the water either. The dog drinks the well water (because he’s a big dog and drinks a lot of water and we don’t want to buy THAT much water) and he’s going on eleven years. It’s just that bottled water is more convenient and easily carry-able, and like I said, there’s other drinks we have more of.
At home, I drink tap water I’ve filtered with Brita. The water here isn’t bad at all, but it makes it a little better. I’ve recently started buying bottled water primarily for my daily commute (which is considerably longer than it has been for many years - now 40 minutes or more each way). I grab a fresh bottle in the morning for the commute in, refill it a couple of times throughout the day with tap water, finish it off on my way home, and toss the bottle in the recycle bin. I think it’s overpriced, but in this case worth the convenience.
When I lived on Bainbridge Island, WA, an earthquake caused the septic tank to contaminate the drinking water ever so slightly. Made me a lifetime fan of bottled water.
We buy bottled water, but primarily to re-use the bottles (we also have a pretty cool water filter, and we refill the bottles and put them back in the fridge when we’re done). But I rarely have qualms drinking straight from the tap, if no filtered water is available.
The only exception has been the time I stayed in a hotel in Hayward, just outside San Francisco. Man, the tapwater in that hotel tasted like rotting animal. I bought a liter bottle of water less than twenty minutes later.
I’m happy to drink tap water at home. However, when I’m out and become thirsty, I’d prefer to buy bottled water rather than some carbonated sugar water or sickly-sweet juice. I usually keep the bottles to refill later.
We drink tap water here, but we always boil it first. Not sure what that does exactly, but my girlfriend swears by it. I’ve noticed though that boiled water tastes much better and if I go back to plain tap water, I get a tummy ache afterwards.
Sometimes there were times when I drank it for the taste when the algae blooms were going on, although I knew it was safe and fine for showering, cooking, etc.