Tapped Out

To paraphrase an old axiom: You don’t buy water, you only rent it. So why did Americans spend nearly $11 billion on bottled water in 2006, when we could have guzzled tap water at up to about one ten-thousandth the cost? The facile answer is marketing, marketing and more marketing, but Elizabeth Royte goes much deeper into the drink in “Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It,” streaming trends cultural, economic, political and hydrological into an engaging investigation of an unexpectedly murky substance. Partway through her undoctrinaire book, Royte, a lifelong fan of tap water, refills her old plastic water bottle, reflecting that “what once seemed so simple and natural, a drink of water, is neither. All my preconceptions about this most basic of beverages have been queered.” And by the end of the book she will have discarded the old plastic bottle too, but not the tap.

BOTTLEMANIA
How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It.
By Elizabeth Royte.
248 pp. Bloomsbury. US $24.99.
Story from The New York Times online By LISA MARGONELLI
Published: June 15, 2008