Steve Reads

This is an unenjoyable book that wants to be a captivating pamphlet.

If you see the title and think that this book meshes with what you already believe — namely that

• bottled water is an egregious slam against the environment, particularly the endless plastic bottles left to rot in gutters and wash out to sea
• tap water tastes almost as good as bottled water (and would taste just as good as bottled water if you stirred it a bit or let it sit in a pitcher overnight)
• consuming tap water makes you more likely to pay attention to the devastation that farming, industry, and lawn-care runoff are wreaking on the environment

– then you are probably right. You haven’t paid to nod your head vigorously for four hours, though. Books like Omnivore's Dilemma, Food Politics, or What To Eat will all appeal to a certain brand of enlightened American, but they’re not just rehashing what we already believe. What To Eat, in particular, is a cornucopia of practical advice on what to buy when you’re in the grocery store; it’s meant to be propped open in the basket at the back end of your grocery cart. Omnivore's Dilemma offers something different: a wider-perspective look at how food moves from ground to corn to cow to plate.

Bottlemania, I think, wants to combine some elements of both these approaches. It is, at points, an absolutely gripping zoomed-out view of how water travels from the clouds to lakes to groundwater to your home. For a moment I thought I had misjudged it as a rather boring, not-really-very-informative tirade against the bottled-water industry. A minute later I was back to the main thrust of the book, which is I think supposed to be something about democratic control of water supplies. We spend endless (endless, endless) hours in Fryeburg, Maine, where Poland Spring, a division of Nestlé, keeps fighting — per its corporate mission — to obtain more and more water from the town. At one point — for a few pages — we see democracy in action, as the good citizens of Fryeburg assemble for their annual town meeting and vote down a provision that would have given even more favorable terms to Poland Spring. The rest of our time in Fryeburg is spent looking at pipes in the ground, following the flow of the Saco River as it nourishes Maine, and generally understanding the contours of the water industry. All well and good, but it could have been condensed to 20 pages at most.

Contrary to her goals, Royte actually proves too much. She wants to argue that democratic control of water, rather than corporate control which remains opaque to the citizens it affects, is for the best, and she’ll find no argument from me there. But what she ends up showing is that we humans are just terrible at managing our resources. It’s not clear, by the end of Bottlemania, that we know how to keep our streams clean and our groundwater uncontaminated. The entire United States becomes, in the reader’s head, a pulsating mass of toxic chemicals leaching into the groundwater; public water officials can only control a small subset of them. They do their very best, and I certainly ended Bottlemania with a lot of respect for what they do. But it’s an uphill battle. And even after they’ve drawn away everything nasty that they could find, one still wonders where the extracted nastiness goes. The answer seems to be that it becomes part of the sewage, which goes back into rivers to be cleaned by municipal water departments further downstream. This is not a pleasant story. And it’s not clear that municipal water officials would do all that much better than Nestlé at stopping the onslaught. As for corporate rapacity, Royte doesn’t give any examples of Nestlé malfeasance to exceed New York’s drowning Westchester County towns to create a reservoir, Boston’s doing the same to create the Quabbin, or Chicago’s reversing the flow of the Chicago River to send the gift of sewage to St. Louis.

If you suspect that this book, while stomach-turning, is ethically nourishing, you’re right. It’s just that it needs to be drastically slimmed down and issued as a pamphlet from the Natural Resources Defense Council, thick with horrifying statistics and minus the pointless, droning series of interviews with Fryeburg’s notables.

My advice? Pick it up, skip to page 100 or so, read it until it repeats something you already read, and return it to the library.