Excerpt from The Curious Habits of Man
There can be no greater marketing triumph than the creation and promoting of bottled water … Never mind that something like seventy percent of all bottled water comes directly and unapologetically, without being changed in any way, from municipal systems (i.e., tap water), or that bottled water is almost certainly less healthy than tap water by virtue of residing for months in plastic bottles, potentially absorbing all manner of petrochemicals that leach fro them plastic, or that while the safety and quality of municipal water is closely regulated, there are no analogous regulations at all for bottled water. All these realities notwithstanding, people the world over have, in less than a decade, voluntarily begun handing over as much as two dollars a bottle for something that is available for free in unlimited quantities. There is no plausible explanation for such a fantastic turn of events save for marketing. By tying notions of your personal image and self-worth to the brand on a bottle of water you carry around, marketers have succeeded in convincing people not only that they cannot do without the bottled product, but that there is actually something wrong with drinking the free variety.