My husband upon seeing the Poland Spring truck headed up our neighbor’s driveway: Why does our neighbor get spring water delivered when she literally has an artesian well?
My husband, popping his head into my office about 60 seconds later: You know she’s broke, right? [extra context: bottled water is just one of several premium services that we know she pays for, and though we try not to be nosy, we can’t help occasionally wondering how she manages to afford so many luxuries on a single income. Hell, we wonder how anyone is managing to afford anything these days . . . .]
It’s impressive how the bottled-water industry has managed to convince people that water pumped out of the ground in a faraway place, dumped into a plastic bottle, and then driven hundreds of miles down a highway is better than water pumped directly out of the ground beneath your feet and into your water glass.
But it could be that our neighbor simply doesn’t like the way the well water tastes, in which case I’m sympathetic. Our well water tastes good most of the time. But, as the weather gets warmer the water gets warmer, both as it’s coming out of the ground and as it sits in whatever container you’re drinking it out of, which brings out a metallic tang. Often I deal with that by adding fruit-juice concentrate to my water. My go-to juice is sour cherry, but pomegranate and aronia berry are also good. I add just enough to give the water a hint of sourness and cover up the metallic taste (now that I think on it, this is probably why some people add lemon slices to their water, but oddly enough I can’t stand lemon in my water). The juice concentrate is dark in color, and even a small quantity turns the water red. The kids and I call the juiced water “blood.” I also recently purchased an insulated water bottle. It keeps the water, which I always get from the fridge rather than the tap, cold for longer. Neither juice concentrate nor insulated water bottles come cheap, but hopefully they’re less expensive than spring water deliveries.
Related: I read an article about microplastic recently. Of course there’s microplastic in bottled water, but it’s also found in a lot of tap water. And although nobody knows what effect microplastics have on the body, pretty much everyone agrees it’s unlikely to be good. The focus of this particular article was about an interesting thing that scientists have discovered about microplastic in water. Apparently, boiling the water in a pot–if it’s hard water that contains calcium–causes the plastic to bond to the calcium, leaving the plastic stuck in the scale that’s left behind on the pot. That is, boiling gets the plastic out of the water. Given how annoying hard water is sometimes, it’s nice to finally hear something positive about it!