Check The Source

I had a very interesting thing brought to my attention last week while attending a shareholders meeting and financial report overview at work. As you walked into the conference area there was the usual table with snacks, tea and coffee, soft drinks as well as pitchers of ice water and cups. Although many of us, myself included, have a bottle we regularly carry around and use at work many, like me, did not think to bring them. Mine actually has a sweet ass filter on it that is so good if you put a soft drink into it and squeeze it out you will actually get a class of water - really, it's that good.

The reason I bring up the personal bottles we all carry around is because I can't help but wonder if we had brought them to the meeting then would we have filled them up from the ice water that was for sure out of the tap in our cafeteria?

I am betting my money that the majority of attendees, if not everyone that chose to drink water would have taken a bottled water over the tap water, on ice but from the faucet and in no way "extra purified" or from some far away mountain spring or glacier runoff as its source.

So here we all sat listening to the conference call, taking notes and drinking our bottles of water feeling good about not only replenishing our bodies with water over the soft drink choices but the fact that we were doing so from a prime source, or were we?

About 1/2 way through the conference call one of the other managers in my studio pointed something out to me. I guess he was drifting off a little and decided to read the bottles label for a second for a mental break from data and numbers being the key topics of the session - and as expected.

Anyway, he says to me how funny it is that we all chose this water. Probably as I have mentioned already, thinking we were getting "the best" by doing so I immediately looked at my bottles label to figure out what he had stumbled upon.

Upon further investigation the waters label clearly defines it's source and I will be the first to admit that I was a bit taken back by this. The bottles water source said:

Source: Municipal Water Supply, Modesto California. Umm WTF!?!?

So basically all of us chumps were too good to drink the ice water from our local Municipal water supply but were more than happy to do so from the Modesto water supply because it was in a convenient bottle. I can only assume this water may be inferior by nature unless they do some magic filtering processes. I come to this conclusion only based on the fact that California is over populated, smoggy, polluted. The irony that comes out of this is that California has water shortages for farmers to grow their crops, yet it's perfectly fine to bottle their supposedly limited water supply and sell it to anyone outside the state, probably inside the state as well. Actually wait, that part does not surprise me and sounds exactly like something California would think was a great idea.

Surprised and assuming this is a rare and nothing more than cheap water I checked others I had from different companies that tout the "goodness of their water" and what do you know. Bottled in Riverside county, San Bernardino California was another one.

I think you get the idea but dam, I still can't get over this and honestly feel a bit foolish assuming I was paying good money for spring water that was highly filtered and pure. Maybe I am getting the highly filtered part of the deal from this seemingly cheap faucet water that has been bottled in the thinnest of plastic possible but still, kind-of annoys the hell out of me.

In Conclusion

I think that now, no I know for sure that from this point forward I plan to check the labels and should they be sourced from some Municipal water supply, especially in California I will not give them my money unless there is simply no other choice. Who knows, maybe the Fiji and VOSS waters along with a few others that are some of my favorites are no better, something I will have to look into at some point I guess to better understand it all rather than make assumptions as I have been all along. I love VOSS because it comes in either a PET bottle or a glass bottle. This way I can reuse it with the dreaded tap water at work and run it through my filter first and don't have to worry about the breakdown of the bottles plastic.

I guess my point is to know what you are buying and make sure that a nice bottle with a label and a cap does not sell you on what is essentially nothing more than tap water. I should say, I don't mean to slander or rag on these companies, more power to them I suppose if they can get chumps to lay down hard earned cash for something they could get from home for probably 1/16th the cost, I guess we are paying for the convenience as well obviously. I guess I just thought bottled water ALWAYS meant that it came from somewhere other than a Municipal supply and was highly purified as well.

Lesson learned, hope you have learned something along the way as well. If you are OK with all of this then all is good and move on with life. If not, then now is your chance to spend that extra 30 cents up to a dollar and get what you were looking for in the first place.

Otherwise if you want nothing more than water and don't care if the source is municipal tap water or my filtered piss put into a nicely labeled bottle with a cap then hey, its a free country (somewhat still anyway). Go for it and quench your thirst however you see fit!

Photo: Here is the label from the bottle of water that I picked up at the shareholder meeting. Everyone grabbed these vs. getting ice water that had obviously come from the facet. Was this a better choice? Notice "the source" of the water, hmm.