by Sarah J Palmer

Created on: May 12, 2009   Last Updated: May 15, 2009

What other species in the planet drinks anything other than plain old rainwater? We have fizzy, natural, mineral, tap, filtered and flavoured. And despite, or is it because of, the choice we waste it! Perhaps if we only had the original we'd appreciate it more.

Availability of a product dictates the degree of our desire for greater quality. Ample availability raises our levels of fussiness, socially obliging us to insist on variety, novelty and exclusivity. Eventually the item loses its intrinsic materialistic value to us and we start wasting it, seemingly oblivious in the case of water, to the essence of its vitality to us.

Does it really matter whether your mineral water is French or Scottish? I sometimes think 'they' started the Bottled Water Argument just to distract us from the "Acid Rain Argument". Let's face it, whatever its provenance, whether it is bottled ethically and has low food miles, it still won't travel the number of miles a typical African walks in a lifetime of fetching water.

Perhaps if we didn't boil it to make hot drinks we'd use fewer resources, which would cause less global warming? Or maybe if we didn't drink tea, coffee and cocoa we'd not use up overseas resources in cultivating land? But what employment would all those tea pickers and coffee plantation workers have if we didn't buy their produce?

The sales from such endeavours help contribute to wells and tapped water in villages previously without such essentials. To our shame one has to ask why, when we have access to sanitation systems that are the envy of billions of people in developing countries, do we need to have signs to remind us to wash our hands in public places. Have we really reached such a state of indulgent lassitude that we need to be told to do something that children overseas would delight in doing?

Washing hands with soap and water reduces diarrhoeal disease by over 40%. So why do we have so much television advertising for medicines to stop an avoidable disease? Is being dirty our hidden national disgrace? According to UK WaterAids website (www.wateraid.org.uk) 884 million people are without access to clean water. That's to drink, not to bathe in. We laugh over the days when great grandma washed the kids in the bath, then used the same water for herself rather than fetch and boil more from the well in the garden. People abroad are still living those days. Only they don't have wells at the end of their street, much less their garden.

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>