The Marketing of Thirst

Bottlemania
By Elizabeth Royte
(Bloomsbury, 248 pages, $24.99)

Two years ago, the upscale bottled-water company Fiji published a cheeky ad that read: "The label says Fiji because it's not bottled in Cleveland." The ad writers were no doubt making a watery allusion to the pollutant-fueled fire on Cleveland's Cuyahoga River back in 1969, an episode that severely stained the city's reputation. This time, Cleveland decided to fight fire with fire. The local water authority released its findings: Fiji water contained more than six micrograms of arsenic per liter, while Cleveland's tap water contained none. Fiji protested, but the damage was done, and the ad campaign quickly ended.

As it turns out, supposed arsenic content may be one of the milder complaints against bottled water these days, despite its continued popularity. Like tobacco and pleasurable food (you know, the kind with fat in it), water has become, for some, a symbol of ethical blindness and irresponsible decadence, at least when it comes in plastic bottles. Over the past few years, some mayors have said they will stop spending public money on bottled water, and some restaurateurs, like Alice Waters, no longer sell it. An apotheosis of sorts was reached when the National Coalition of American Nuns asked its members to forgo bottled water in favor of the tap variety.

Such scourge-campaigns follow, naturally, from great commercial success. Per-capita consumption of bottled water in the U.S. nearly quintupled from 1987 to 2006 -- a mysterious development, in certain ways, since of course water is widely available in America, virtually free, and in many places it tastes rather good. Even so, Americans now spend about $11 billion on bottled water a year -- more than they spend on beer, milk or coffee. The story of how this shift in consumption habits happened, and why it matters, is what Elizabeth Royte sets out to tell in "Bottlemania."

She begins with a brief history of water's significance beyond mere survival. She notes that, even for the ancient Greeks, Romans and Assyrians, water was a geopolitical asset, fought over and used to punish enemies and favor friends. The battles that are erupting over water in Darfur today, in Sudan, are not all that dissimilar, Ms. Royte observes, from those that erupted in the American Southwest in the 1870s. Desert climates, obviously, make water especially precious and prone to conflicting claims.

For centuries, water has also been marketed for its therapeutic and restorative powers -- the Belgian town of Spa has offered thermal baths since the 14th century and today does a brisk business in bottled water. The U.S. was home to some regional bottled-water companies in the 19th and 20th centuries, but bottled water did not truly penetrate the American market until the late 1970s.

That's when Perrier, a French company, launched a $4 million advertising campaign to get Americans drinking water out of bottles, a mostly European habit until then. The company's annual sales tripled. Perrier dominated the bottled-water market until 1990, when its water was found to contain excessive amounts of benzene and the company was forced to recall millions of bottles from store shelves. Other brands seized the opportunity, diving into the bottled-water market with a vengeance. From 1990 to 1997, yearly U.S. sales of bottled water shot up to $4 billion from $115 million.

Ms. Royte does not spend much time on the cleverness of marketing campaigns -- for instance, their attempts to associate their product with clean living and health-consciousness. Lest we forget, the bottled water push coincided with a growing cultural idea -- that America was under-"hydrated," a condition that could only be cured by drinking eight glasses of water a day. As the comic Lewis Black has angrily noted: "When I was a kid, and water was free, nobody ever told you how much water to drink. Ever. Four glasses of milk, but nothing about water. But then they started bottling water, and as soon as they started bottling it, they said eight bottles a day. Eight! Eight! That's like a god---- homework assignment! I can't remember what day it is. Now I have to remember how many bottles of water I drank?"

For Ms. Royte, the focus is on the damage that bottled water supposedly does to the planet. "Bottlemania" is less a business or marketing book than a work of environmental advocacy. Big business is the bad guy.

Ms. Royte tells much of her story by recounting the prolonged dispute that pits some of the residents of Fryeburg, Maine (pop. 3,000), against one of America's most popular bottled waters, Poland Spring. Fryeburg is home to the natural spring that supplies Poland Spring with its water (168 million gallons in 2005), and the storyline in "Bottlemania" is filled with all the suspects one expects to find in a dispute like this: the greedy multinational (Nestle, which owns Poland Spring); the pure-as-snow citizen activists who worry about land fills and nonbiodegradable containers; and the local authorities, thirsty for revenue, who are alleged to be caught in web of conflicts.

There are legitimate questions about the ownership of the water supply in Fryeburg and the appropriate price for access to it, but it is hard to trust the fairness of Ms. Royte's account. At one point she describes Maine's local activists as "allied with angry citizens across the nation who are standing up to corporate behemoths for control of their communities." Her tone seems to throw into doubt the very legitimacy of corporate investment, profit-seeking, job creation and everything else we think of as commercial activity.

Luckily, Ms. Royte also spends time with a bottled water connoisseur, Michael Mascha, with whom she samples waters from Norway, Croatia, Germany, Newfoundland, Wales, Italy, Arkansas and Singapore. And she explores municipal water supplies. New York's is of such high quality that the Environmental Protection Agency doesn't require it to be filtered. Boston, San Francisco, Seattle and Portland are the only other big cities in this hallowed category.

Ms. Royte also runs through a litany of studies of tap water that may have the effect of pushing the reader toward bottled water despite its environmental hazards (look up hypospadias if you really want to be spooked) or scrambling to buy a water filter. But she also summarizes a number of studies that have shown bottled water, and the bottles holding the water, to contain a host of scary-sounding contaminants.

So is any water truly safe for consumption? Ms. Royte assures us in her final pages that "the vast majority of Americans . . . can keep drinking tap water without worry." I'll drink to that -- and I suspect that Cleveland's city officials will, too.

Mr. Rees is a senior director at the White House Writers Group, a Washington consulting firm.