West Chester Dish

So what happens when smart people devote their lives to cooking, serving and thinking about food? They sometimes come up with great ideas that threaten to transform the way we cook, eat and, in the present instance, drink.

According to this recent article in the NY Times, in 2002, a San Francisco restaurant opened with a menu that did not have any bottled water. Instead, Incanto offered filtered tap water. Four years later, Alice Waters picked up on the idea and dropped bottled water from the menu at Chez Panisse and spiffied up the no bottled-water concept a bit by offering intra-tap carbonated water. Then the press picked up on it and now the Batali-Bastianichs are doing it and, sheesh, for all I know Wolfgang Puck is doing it, too. (But I bet if he is he won’t be able to resist bottling it and hawking it on the HSN) Watch out for Wolf-Wasser!)

Personally, I’m okay with the practice of selling bottled sparkling water in restaurants, if it is fairly priced and that is what people want to drink. But bottled still water? You must be kidding.

I don’t care if your bottled still water is made from asteroid ice. I’m not buying it. Give me tap water or another bottle of wine. But despite the fact that I like to order the sparkling stuff, I think it is a terrific idea for high-profile restaurateurs to make a show of eschewing all bottled water and replacing it with filtered tap, carbonated on-site or straight-up aqua pura.

Here’s why:

Americans drink too got-damn much bottled water.

Right now we consume the contents of about 70 million water bottles a day. That’s 70 million mostly plastic bottles, 86 % of which end up in landfills. I’m not even going to get into the energy costs and other environmental issues associated with this because they are easy enough to imagine. But come on, 70 million bottles of something that could have been gotten for almost nothing from a tap? This is just stupid. By setting an example, chefs like Alice Waters will discourage some people from thinking that it is fashionable or gastronomically necessary to have it on the table, and hopefully drive down consumption as well.

And anyway,

bottled water is often indistinguishable from tap water.

I’ll give you two bottles of water both marked “Poland Springs.” One will be filled with water from a well in Poland Springs, Maine, and the other will be from the well in my front yard. I will ask you to taste them and answer the following question “Which water reminds you of what it means to be from Maine?” You will be dumbfounded, perhaps you will say “both?” Or “what does it mean to be from Maine, anyway? (I’ve never been able to answer this question myself. The best answer I’ve come up with has been ‘To be from Maine is to be from blueberries, trees and LL Bean.’)”

Then there is the problem that

bottled water is infantilizing.

Show me an adult who toddles around a shopping mall or perambulates through the park sucking on a bottle of water and I’ll ask you to squint. Then I’ll say, “Ya think he’s wearing diapers?”

It’s not an accident that so many water bottles come with nipples. Manufacturers may have added the nipple as a device to allow you to drink the water without having to fumble with a screw cap, and that may be why most people decide to buy it that way. But nothing that anyone does is only done for one reason. And, I don’t think I’m straining credulity at all by suggesting that another reason those nipples are there is that sucking on them is soothing in the same way and for the same reasons that sucking on a bottle is soothing to a baby.

I could go on at great length about how nuts it is that we consume so much bottled water when there’s so much good tap water around to be had for next to nothing. But I don’t want to get too far away from my central point, which is to say that I think it’s wonderful that high-profile chefs and restaurateurs like Alice Waters (Hey, no irony in that last name, huh?) and Molto Mario are demonstrating a pathway out of the looming translucent forest of plastic bottles that has been foisted upon us by the nattering nabobs of consumerism and our own innate need to suck.

Now where’s my canteen?