Many years ago a Philip Morris CEO explained his move into food. There was a possibility that people would give up smoking, although he doubted it. But they were not going to give up eating. Of course, he could have gone a step further: people cannot give up drinking. Even fasters unto death and dieters unto daintiness must top up their vital body fluids. I well remember one midsummer in India having to make the choice between the don’t drink the water! injunction and dehydration. The well with the frogs in it won hands down. Of course, there are some thirsts – of the ethanol and caffeine kind, for example – that add oomph to your water. Before tea and coffee, Europeans drank beer and wine because any long-term damage to their livers was more than outweighed by the fatal-at-worst and uncomfortable-at-best consequences of drinking the water. Boiling the water for tea and coffee killed the fecal load that was an almost inevitable consequence of urban wells.
But for over a century, in an outstanding example of socialist enterprise, cities all over the world have provided cheap, clean, potable water to their inhabitants. In New York, even the best efforts of City Hall have not yet spoilt one of the world’s best water supplies.
There was a time when New Yorkers considered it a creditable and honorable feat to sell the Brooklyn Bridge to tourists. But that’s nothing compared with the sale of millions of gallons of dihydrogen oxide bottled and shipped around the world at incredible expense, only to be sold at an even more incredible mark-up in restaurants.
In Manhattan’s posh restaurants, the waiters are trained to cast a special look – double- barreled, gimlet-eyed, down either side of their nostrils – at anyone who has the temerity to ask for tap water. One can distract oneself with etymology: Why do Americans get tap water from what Brits call taps but Americans call faucets? But in the end you will squirm under this inquisitorial, make-my-accountant’s-day stare and order some fancy bottled spring water from a glacier in Argentina, or a spring in the mountains of Montenegro. The bottle costs more to produce than the water. Chances are you will compromise and ask for sparkling water so you feel that at least you are getting value added for your dining dollars.
It is true that water seems more refreshing when chilled, and even more so when it has carbon dioxide dissolved in it. It is also a good fringe benefit of carbonated waters that they provide too acidic an environment for your usual microfauna and microflora to flourish.
However, while I admit to the theoretical possibility that one in every thousand consumers may be able to tell the difference between Perrier or San Pellegrino and soda water from the local supermarket, I do so only in the same expansive frame of mind that accepts the possibility that all molecules of air in my office may suddenly move to the other side at once, leaving me gasping like a guppy out of water.
Even so, intimidating diners is itself a petty scam compared with the great soft drinks industry, which actually provides more end-user H2O than city waterworks. Two of the biggest companies in the world get their billions from adding carbon dioxide, sugar, caffeine and sundry dyes to water – which they doubtless get cheap from the city water supply. The resulting tooth-rotting, obesifying product has done more for the collective earnings of the American Dental Association than stainless steel braces. The companies say they add caffeine as a “flavor enhancer”, although recent studies show that most people can’t actually taste it – though they surely crave for it if they don’t get it.
Strangely enough, while Reaganite missionaries persuaded the rest of the world to privatize their water supplies, here in the heartland of free enterprise, water is still mostly provided by local government. That surely cannot last. Governments are short of money, investors have oodles, so there is a sort of hydraulic pressure building up. But how to make sure that private water competes with the colas of the world? For a start, no one truly appreciates a commodity that appears to be free. So as a first step, household, school and office faucets and drinking fountains should be replaced with coin-operated water vending machines. They would still be much cheaper than the ubiquitous soda machines in public places, but they would teach consumers the value of the product, rescuing it from its current commercial disdain.
And if you can add chlorine and fluorine at source, the next step is surely caffeination at source. This may or may not, enhance the flavor, but it will certainly enhance sales as well as doing immense public good, making Americans perky, bright and productive. Indeed, so convinced am I of the public benefits that I offer, free of copyright, “Wake Up America!” as the slogan for the impending IPO of H20.com.
The Speculator
