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8 - Orono Weekly Times Wednesday, October 21, 2009 Basic Black by Arthur Black H2 Ho Ho: the joke's on us Some torrid, tropical afternoon when you find yourself at a folk festival or an outdoor carnival, with the sun beating down on you and your throat dryer than a Stephen Harper press release you will look up and see what appears to be a mirage. You will see, through the shimmering heat waves, a wagon of stainless steel winking in the midday sun. Protruding from its flanks will be 10 fountains, each urging you to take a sip. Press your parched lips to a spigot and you will taste clear, fresh, cold, invigorating.... Water. Ah! Evian water, flown in from the French Alps, no doubt? Or perhaps San Pellegrino from that Papalblessed aquifer in Italy? Or Fiji water shipped direct from the pristine Yaqara Valley? Might it be Gerolsteiner from Germany? Dasani from California at the very least? Nah. The water wagon will be offering plain, ordinary tap water. And unlike the above named aqueous alternatives, this water will be absolutely free. It's a service being offered only by Metro Vancouver so far, but I can see it catching on across the country. It's good PR for municipalities that supply water to their constituents; it's dirt - well, water -- cheap and it's good for the planet too because it encourages people to stop wasting their money on those expensive, wasteful, polluting plastic bottles of imported water that nobody ever needed in the first place. And it just might be the coup de grace for a world-wide fraud so lucrative it makes Bernie Madoff's Ponzi racket look like a back-alley, penny ante crap game. For decades we have all been victims of a water swindle. If it was frozen, we could call it a snow job, but it's not icy - just ludicrously pricey. It's the bottled water craze. It was a two-pronged con job: first we had to be convinced we were risking severe dehydration. (What? You're not gulping down two litres of water a day? MEDIC! Dead man walking here!) Then we had to believe our tap water was poison. Well, how else could they sucker us into shelling out serious coin for a tiny plastic vial of something that came into our homes by the gallon practically for free? It was a confidence trick on both levels. Number one, no one this side of a Bactrian camel needs two litres of water a day. The old '8X8' chestnut eight 8 oz. glasses per person per day - is completely bogus, probably based on a misreading of an old U.S. Institute of Medicine brochure. In any case, the human body takes its water from a host of sources - juice, coffee, beer - even chicken legs and hamburger buns. Nobody with solid medical credentials has ever suggested that we each need to chug down two litres of water a day to stay healthy. It just ain't true. We wouldn't be here if it was. Our ancestors would have pitched over and died ages ago, their bleached bones littering the roadsides. As one expert says, "Somehow we all survived without carrying around water and chugging every 10 minutes." It wasn't enough to seduce us with glamorous new water options. We also had to be convinced that public water sources were not to be trusted. A spokesman for Fiji water got the ball rolling. At a news conference he airily proclaimed that "processed water," (that's what water bottlers call the stuff that comes out of our taps) "is not a real or viable alternative." He declared that tap water could contain "4,000 contaminants." He neglected to mention that bottled water brands routinely fail public hygiene standards. Last year alone, two brands Sam's Choice (Wal-Mart) and Volvic (Danone) were tested and found to contain unacceptable levels of toxic chemicals. Many bottled waters are, of course, safe to drink. That's not unrelated to the fact that many companies fill their plastic bottles with municipal tap water, slap a fancy label on it and sell it to gullible gullets at prices that would make a cocaine dealer blush. At any rate, hats off to the city of Vancouver for shattering the myth of bottled water supremacy and for reminding us all that we already pay for perfectly good water delivered right to our homes. And good riddance to that old, phoney, kidney-challenging lie about having to chugalug eight glasses of water a day. Still worried about dehydration? Mark Knepper, chief of the electrolyte metabolism lab at the National Institute for Health has a failsafe guideline. "Take a sip," he advises. "You can tell if you need the water by how good it tastes when you try it." Listening to our own bodies. What a concept.