A Change in the World as We Know It

I'm always fascinated by signs of the times, so it was with great interest that I read a piece in yesterday's New York Times reporting that a growing number of Americans are turning to the tap for their drinking water. This back-to-the-future move, a result of consumers' efforts to cut costs and become better environmental stewards, has so affected PepsiCo's profits, that the company announced thousands of lay-offs. Is this what's meant by trickle-down economics now that we live in the post bailout world? The same day the Environmental Working Group issued a report citing contaminants in 10 brands of bottled water. So much for paying for quality.

Even this morning, as Sam and I talked over what snacks to take his class when it's our turn next week, he reminded me: "No juice, Mom. We drink water from the fountain."

I'm not a huge fan of what flows out of Washington's taps--it has too much of a chlorine aftertaste for me. And at our last house, the lead level in the water was so high that it caught Sam's pediatrician's notice well before revelations surfaced about lead pipes in several of the District's neighborhoods, including ours. 

Nonetheless I can happily imagine an evening when Ralph and I go out to dinner and our waiter assumes that we'd like regular water rather than offering us a range of slickly bottled choices in reverential tones usually reserved for the most expensive wines. 

Maybe I crave this simplicity because I grew up in Atlanta, where Coca-Cola was also born. In my world, Coke was the generic term for soda just as Kleenex stands for tissue and Xerox for photocopying. The polite host would invariably offer you a "Coke" if you dropped by, by which he or she meant anything non-alcoholic to drink, including, I believe, water. You could answer something like, "That'd be great! I'd love some ginger-ale."

At the World of Coca-Cola, yet another marketing tool for the company's soft drinks, this one slightly disguised as a museum, a number of the exhibits suggest that Coke was at least partly responsible for many of the gains our society has made in the past century, including such landmarks as civil rights. At the end of your "tour," you have the opportunity to hold out a cup into which the bubbly soda sprays from a fountain. I didn't know whether to be disgusted or delighted, but I put my cynicism aside and drank the hypothetical Kool-aid.

The only other time I've seen anything like that was when Ralph and I went to the Kentucky Derby in Louisville, Ken., several years ago. After the horses ran and we had the requisite experience of losing at the betting window, we went to a party thrown at the home of a local whiskey scion. On the wide back lawn they had set up a white-cloth-draped table on top of which sat a sterling-silver fountain of cascading mint juleps. I don't know for sure, but I'd bet people would use fewer plastic water bottles if that's what came out of their kitchen tap.