BOTTLEMANIA: HOW WATER WENT ON SALE AND WHY WE BOUGHT IT
by ELIZABETH ROYTE
(中文书名(仅供参考):疯迷瓶裝水)
ABOUT THE BOOK
「水」是人們的基本需求，在重視生活品質的現代社會，飲用瓶裝水成為日常的生活習慣。便利商店裡的瓶裝水總類繁多，瓶裝水銷量已超過牛奶、啤酒僅次於汽水。然而所謂的礦泉水、深層水、鹼性水等令人目不暇給的品牌與種類，我們真的了解手中正在飲用的水嗎？！
瓶裝水對於環境已造成重大影響。製造水與瓶裝水容器的過程更消耗了許多能源。在全球鼓吹節能的風潮下，不喝瓶裝水的主張逐漸被重視。此書深入探討瓶裝水的歷史、產業結構、水源污染及文化社會等面向，提供對於瓶裝水的深層反思。
An incisive, intrepid, and habit-changing narrative investigation into the commercialization of our most basic human need: drinking water. Having already surpassed milk and beer, and second now only to soda, bottled water is on the verge of becoming the most popular beverage in the country. The brands have become so ubiquitous that we’re hardly conscious that Poland Spring and Evian were once real springs, bubbling in remote corners of Maine and France. Only now, with the water industry trading in the billions of dollars, have we begun to question what it is we’re drinking and why.
In this intelligent, eye-opening work of narrative journalism, Elizabeth Royte does for water what Eric Schlosser did for fast food: she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that bring it from nature to our supermarkets. Along the way, she investigates the questions we must inevitably answer. Who owns our water? What happens when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s source? Should we have to pay for water? Is the stuff coming from the tap completely safe? And if so, how many chemicals are dumped in to make it potable? What’s the environmental footprint of making, transporting, and disposing of all those plastic bottles?
A riveting chronicle of one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth century as well as a powerful environmental wake-up call, Bottlemania is essential reading for anyone who shells out two dollars to quench their daily thirst.
RELATED ARTICLE
Waterlog
Jul 17th 2008
From The Economist print edition
“SPARKLING or still?” The waiter’s question seems to offer a choice, but is in fact designed to deny it: tap water, after all, is never on the menu. According to Elizabeth Royte’s “Bottlemania”, in 2002 Nestlé produced a training manual aimed at waiters called “Pour on the Tips”. Converting guests to pricey bottled water, it said, could boost their monthly earnings by $100 or more. Some waiters even try to humiliate people who resist. “I get great pleasure out of making each of those ladies who are trying to impress their friends repeat the word ‘tap’ back to me,” wrote a server on “The Waiter’s Revenge”, an online message board.
Snobbery, convenience and worries about tap water have propelled the American bottled-water industry from sales of $4 billion in 1997 to $10.8 billion in 2006. Globally the industry is now worth about $60 billion. As well as the plain variety, there are now bottled waters laced with all sorts of extra ingredients, such as caffeine, appetite suppressants, skin enhancers and even laxatives. Bottled-water giants such as Nestlé, the Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo reckon that the market will continue to fizz. Last year Coca-Cola spent $4.1 billion to buy Glacéau, a firm that makes vitamin-enhanced water.
For bottled-water firms large and small it has been a marketing triumph. So confident are they that one executive promised a gathering of Wall Street analysts in 2000 that tap water would eventually be used only for showers and washing dishes. For those who enjoy conspiracy theory, public water fountains are mysteriously disappearing; renovated airports, for instance, emerge without their fountains—and a proliferation of drinks-vending machines.
Villain of the piece?
It should be easy enough to pillory bottled water. It costs between 250 and 10,000 times more than tap water and in blind tastings people cannot usually separate the fancy beverage from the ordinary stuff. Then there is the environmental cost: according to one estimate, the total energy required to make and deliver each bottle of water is equivalent to filling them a quarter of the way with oil. While New Yorkers enjoy the services of water sommeliers, millions of people in developing countries lack access to any clean water at all.
But although Ms Royte displays all the usual prejudices—private enterprise bad, collective provision good—her book concludes that even in rich countries tap water sometimes contains small quantities of harmful chemicals. She also points out that in water shortages, local authorities may supply people with water reclaimed from sewage without telling them. Bottled water, therefore, “has its place”: a confused message, if an honest one.
Nor do all bottled-water companies come out badly. In Fiji, half of whose inhabitants did not have access to clean water last year, the water-bottler plays an important part in the local economy: it pays well above the minimum wage, builds schools for workers’ children and puts money into a trust for local infrastructure.
Yet in the past few years a backlash against bottled water has gathered pace, with some upmarket restaurants deciding to offer only tap. Gisele Bundchen, a supermodel who has campaigned to conserve fresh water in Brazil, now sports a reusable metal water bottle. What waiter could complain about that?