Guy Dimond is amazed by the variety of mineral waters available in restaurants, but fails to be swayed from his favoured selection
What does water cost? In rural India, it can cost lives. Twenty years ago, I was an aid worker in a remote Indian village. There was no electricity, no access to trained medical care and no tap water. Yet I was one of the lucky ones. The neo-Gandhian charity that employed me had paid for a hand-pump, so in our village we could pump clean, potable water from the rocks far below our feet. In our village of Lal Wadi – “Red Village”, as it was called, because the houses had red roof tiles instead of the more commonplace (mosquito-infested) rice thatch – no one caught the endemic dysentery or hepatitis A from drinking polluted water. These diseases can kill infants and are very unpleasant even for adults. I can vouch for this; I caught both while travelling in India.
The neighbouring village, Shilar Wadi, did not have the US$100 it cost to install a hand-pump. It still drew its water from wells, which became contaminated during the monsoon. In fact, it used three wells; as the groundwater dropped during the hot season, the women and children of the village had to abandon the closest well and walk further down the valley to the wells that still retained water. Just before the monsoon returned, they were walking two miles a day to get essential water for cooking, washing and to drink.
Twenty years on, I no longer work on an agroforestry project in rural India, but in London, as a restaurant critic. In my current home city, mineral water costs as much as US$6-US$8 per bottle in some of the more pretentious restaurants. I never order it: I can’t. Even allowing for inflation, just a box or so of those bottles of London mineral water would have paid for a hand-pump for the villagers of Shilar Wadi.
London tap water suits me fine. It’s clean, free, fairly abundant and – importantly for someone who now relies on his keen palate for a living – it tastes little different to mineral water. In a water tasting I recently helped to conduct, several waters were tasted “blind”, both chilled and at room temperature. My panel of tasters could discern subtle differences, but none could identify which water was which. Perhaps more importantly, the majority of tasters couldn’t pick out the London tap water from the expensive mineral waters.
Looking back at my tasting notes, I discovered London tap water was the one I liked best: probably because it had the taste I was most familiar with.
The rise of mineral water, pumped up by marketing campaigns and the hard sell of restaurants, seems inexorable. Just after the turn of the recent millennium, restaurateur Alain Ducasse introduced a mineral water menu to his US$200+ per head Alain Ducasse at the Essex House restaurant in New York. Half a dozen varieties were offered, in a stainless steel carrier pack. Other New York restaurants soon followed, creating a trend.
On this side of the Atlantic, Claridge’s hotel in Mayfair recently introduced the most impressive mineral water menu yet. It’s a fascinating read, with waters from Arctic glaciers, rainwater gathered in Tasmania, fresh water pumped from below the saline seawater at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. There are waters from Fiji, Japan and Norway. There is even, I notice with a slightly dry throat, spring water from the Nilgiri Hills in India, at US$42 for a litre bottle – more than my monthly paycheck two decades ago.
To have choice is a great thing. But, ultimately, it is only a bottle of water and one that has been collected and transported around the world at considerable cost to the environment – not to mention the consumer.
The charity WaterAid estimates one-sixth of the world’s population does not have access to clean and safe drinking water and around 5,000 children die every day as a result of diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation. To provide a lifetime of clean and safe drinking water to the poor of the world costs, according to WaterAid, about US$30 per head. Think about this the next time the waiter asks you if you want “still or sparkling” – there is a third option and it goes something like this: “Tap water, please.”
Guy Dimond is the Food & Drink editor of Time Out London. For more information visit www.wateraid.org
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