To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Date: Fri, 11 Jul 2003 01:49:28 -0400
Subject: [WSFA] Re: bottled water 'not fresh'
From: ronkean at juno.com
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 19:19:49 -0400 (EDT) "Keith F. Lynch"
<kfl at KeithLynch.net> writes:

> Does bottled water become stale?  How?
>

Bottled water could lose carbonation or dissolved air and become 'flat',
or it might absorb tastes or odors through its plastic bottle or even
from the bottle itself, if the bottle is made of plastic.  Some bottled
water is flavored, and the flavoring might deteriorate.  The cap, or the
sealing material inside the cap, might affect the water over time.  If
the water is mineralized, and/or contains other chemicals not normally
considered undesirable, the minerals or chemicals might precipitate or
react over time to yield some undesirable result.  But for most people,
none of the above would normally be much of a concern.

> What's meant by the age of water, anyway?  The time since it was
> bottled?  If so, brackish malarial swamp water would count as
> perfectly fresh since it's never been bottled.  The time since it fell
as
> rain? If so, water from melted ice age glaciers would could as very
> stale.
>

The article implied that the age of (bottled) water is the elapsed time
since it was bottled, but it would be silly to equate that with the age
of the water itself in a literal sense.  Now that I have carefully
re-read the wording in the article, I can't accuse them of being silly in
precisely that way.  They could be faulted for omitting plausible
examples of just how or why bottled water might go bad in normal shelf
storage.  There are a number of possible reasonable definitions of the
age of water, but absent additional context, there is no particular
correlation between the age of water and its purity.

> I could never be a marketer, as it would never occur to me that
> anyone
> who wasn't dying of thirst in the middle of a desert would pay two
> dollars for half a liter of water.  (Ref:
> http://www.geocities.com/debbiesniderman/water.html)
>

Specialty mineral waters, or naturally sparkling waters, can be prized as
delicacies.  People pay high prices for pate de fois gras or shark meat,
when hamburger or chicken might be just as nutritious.

> Perhaps the ultra-squeamish can help finance space exploration.
> Much
> of the outer solar system consists of ice.  How much would a yuppie
> pay for water guaranteed to have *never* been though any creature's
> kidneys, bladders, or bowels?

One could get 'new' water by burning methane or paraffin in dry air and
collecting and condensing the resulting water vapor.  Those newly
assembled H2O molecules would have no past as molecules one by one,
though their constituent atoms would have a past.

Ron Kean

.

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