Fun Bottled Water Fact

I happened to be working at an environmental lab today. This place performs all sorts of analytical tests on all kinds of things -- mainly soil and water samples. They look for basics like sediments and microbes and more obscure things like dissolved organics and metals. They have a very extensive lab and one of their most basic necessities is very pure water for testing purposes. It wouldn't do much good to use water with dissolved iron or whatever in it during a test for trace amounts of iron. To that end, they have a very nice, and very expensive, water deionization (DI) system.

Knowing all this, I was completely taken aback when I saw one of the technicians filling sample containers from an Evian water bottle. She saw my look and explained that their DI system was down, but that for most of their tests, Evian was the purest thing they could buy. "It doesn't have anything in it. Nothing we'd be looking for anyway."

This would seems like a glowing recommendation for Evian. "It's so pure, you can use it for lab tests." But you have to understand that the dissolved metals that the lab would be concerned about are the same "minerals" that are touted in bottled water marketing, including Evian's website. That means that you are basically getting very clean water, or the same thing that you would get by extensive filtering or distilling. The fact that it's filtered through an Alpine glacier field in France doesn't really matter.

Personally, I've never been a fan of Evian; I've always considered it pretty bland. It turns out I might have been right. The same minerals that apparently aren't in it are the same ones that give water it's taste, and are even added by many other brands specifically for that taste. I've always felt somewhat morally superior to Evian drinkers ("naive" spelled backwards and all that), mostly because I just like to be difficult. This just serves to embolden my holier-than-thou attitude. Just what I needed. I should be a real joy at parties now.