Agua de Culo
The current issue of Scientific American includes a column by noted skeptic Michael Shermer entitled “Bottled Twaddle” (available on-line here) in which he gleefully explodes the myth that bottled water is somehow better for you than regular municipal tap water. In fact, there’s a good chance that the bottle of fancy water you buy at Starbuck’s is just that:
… the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC)…tested more than 1,000 samples of 103 brands of bottled water, finding that "an estimated 25 percent or more of bottled water is really just tap water in a bottle--sometimes further treated, sometimes not." If the label says "from a municipal source" or "from a community water system," it's tap water.
Hilarious. But not nearly as funny as the article’s closing paragraphs describing a taste test conducted by Penn and Teller:
The hosts began with a blind comparison in which 75 percent of New Yorkers preferred city tap to bottled waters. They then went to the Left Coast and set up a hidden camera at a trendy southern California restaurant that featured a water sommelier who dispensed elegant water menus to the patrons. All bottles were filled out of the same hose in the back of the restaurant; nevertheless, Angelenos were willing to plunk down nearly $7 a bottle for L'eau Du Robinet (French for "faucet water"), Agua de Culo (Spanish for "ass water") and Amazone ("filtered through the Brazilian rain forest's natural filtration system"), declaring them all to be far superior to tap water.
This all goes to show you that, despite popular claims to the contrary, both beer and water are better straight from the tap.
No comments:
Post a Comment