A Fly on the Wall

I’m tasting a trend here and my own reaction to it has me perplexed.

Over the past few weeks, the hot-topic issue around analytic media outlets seems to be the fascination with bottled beverages. The NYT, Willamette Week, and Fast Company have all printed piles of words on the topic. How they harm the environment, how politics handle them, and what they say about us Americans, are a few of the key topics. These questions have me ogling bottles, hating on bottles and curiously wanting to try Fiji Water, that’s for damn sure.

“I only drink Fiji Water Karl!”
That line was shouted repeatedly by Sarah Silverman in her stand-up mockumentary “Jesus Christ is Magic” as she throws a bottle of unsuitable un-Fiji Water back at her manager, Karl. My fellow water-obsessed coworker emailed me this before I even read the Fast Company article:

“The label on a bottle of Fiji Water says “from the islands of Fiji.” Journey to the source of that water, and you realize just how extraordinary that promise is. From New York, for instance, it is an 18-hour plane ride west and south (via Los Angeles) almost to Australia, and then a four-hour drive along Fiji’s two-lane King’s Highway.

Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles’ journey is even longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation–which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.”

Pwah! Riiight… that’s just ridiculous. I’m half-embarrassed to admit that I fell into the group of folks who didn’t seriously think that it actually came from the Islands of Fiji. Well, it does. Charles Fishman proves that in his piece, which had me glued to the pages way passed my bedtime.

Turns out that not only is this transported by the pallet-load into our country, but it’s quickly turning into the Evian of the 80s. An extensive Guardian piece on the topic reports that

“Michael Bolton, the singer, is quoted as saying: ‘I only drink Fiji Water. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to taste the purity.’ The company’s own press release states that ‘Ozzy Osbourne is hardly ever spotted out and about without it’… Other celebrity fans: Tom Cruise, Heather Graham, P. Diddy, Quentin Tarantino, Jennifer Aniston, Renée Zellweger. Elton John has been seen drinking it. It has featured in episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Sex and the City. It’s the official water of the restaurant Nobu.”

Now really, none of those people or shows really matter, but the fact that it made it into Sarah Silverman’s movie proved that it was obviously hot enough in Hollywood to mock it. You know you’ve really made it when someone makes fun of you, right?

It’s easy to hate bottled water when you really stop and think about it. Umm, duh, water’s free–so why the hell would you waste money paying for it? Because we’re so paralyzed with fear of the deadly germs that flow from our American faucets and (gasp!) let us not go a drop dehydrated at any point in our day! And as the NYT and the WW point out, they’re filling up our landfills like crazy and are a popular street litter item. So much so that lawmakers are adding to the list of bottles to put deposits on.

We’re buying it up by the lake-load because it’s good, it’s pretty, and we can. That’s why I buy it anyway. I’m not a huge consumer of bottled water, but I do enough to know I’m buying the convenience… and those bottles? Gorgeous. I saw an “end-cap” (that’s grocery-store talk for a big display of one product at the end of an aisle) of Fiji Water the other day and it literally made me stop my bee-line to the bathroom just so I could stare at those picturesque palm trees printed on the insides of the bottles. Niice.

I just feel so conflicted about bottled water when it gets right down to it. One of my voices reiterates that all of this consciousness around this symbolic product in our culture is valid, positive and important; however my unadulterated, deafeningly loud American voice shouts–don’t be ridiculous–consumption isn’t going to flat out stop. That’s just not going to happen. It’s like a when-in-Rome thing. This is the game and I’m here to play. If Fiji Water is available in this life time, well then bring it on.

So I have bought some yet?
My sassy friend who makes my latte three days a week likes to say things like, “How does it feel to want?” when he sees people waiting in his line for coffee. If he’d ask me that question in front of that Fiji Water display I’d say, “Well, better than guilt at this point, but you should try it and tell me what it’s like.” You can’t blame a girl for wanting her glamorous bottle, without drinking the water too.

-Catherine