I’m in the Atlantic Ocean off Rockaway Beach in New York, on a 36-degree day in mid-January. The last few years have seen dozens of studies citing the benefits of cold-water swimming for longevity. If I don’t get hypothermia, I may live forever. That’s not why I’m splashing in the ocean in a Speedo, though, with 20 other swimmers. I’m risking death by freezing because I’m contemplating our most fetishized and most threatened natural resource. And what better vantage from which to do it?
“As Coleridge said: ‘Water, water, everywhere, / Nor any drop to drink,’ ” I observe through chattering teeth to a fellow swimmer, attired in a string bikini and black neoprene booties. Before I can explain that I’m being both literal and metaphorical, I realize that I can’t feel my feet.
I’m referring to humanity’s water crisis. In one sense, we live at peak water—in thalassic terms, you might call it the crest of a wave. The global market for bottled water is worth over $300 billion. Stanley cups—extra-large adult sippy vessels required for #WaterTok—have gone viral, with a Cosmo Pink Galentine’s Day drop listed for $250 on Poshmark.
On the other hand, all the hype obscures a fact: The future of water must look different than the past. Not only because of obvious portents of climate change—see: a flooded Los Angeles in February, or a 2023 drought that cut Spain’s olive oil production in half. This January, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences released a study that found the average liter of bottled water contains about 240,000 bits of micro- and nanoplastics. (A quick primer from the Ocean Conservancy’s Anja Brandon, PhD: “Nanoplastics are the next size down from microplastics—the vast majority are secondary microplastics that shed from other plastics or break down in the environment.” When I summarize my understanding of the situation back to her, she says I have it about right: Our rain contains plastic, we shed plastic, and whatever plastic we initially avert, we eat.) Less than 1 percent of earth’s water is available for human consumption, and more than 2 billion people—a quarter of the world’s population—currently lack access to fresh water. I consider asking ChatGPT for a summary. Then I read that in the US, ChatGPT uses half a liter of water for a 20-line conversation. To paraphrase the conclusions of last year’s UN Water Conference: In coming years, places with abundant water will begin to see scarcity; places with short supply will find supply shorter.
Is it any wonder we’ve become obsessed with water? It’s our last hurrah! But we need water to survive. Dried off and settled in front of my computer, I proceed with research. I peruse a 32-page water menu from a restaurant in Galicia, Spain, named O Lar do Leitón. Another menu, from Wet restaurant and lounge in Miami—its setting is described online as “a two-level underwater kingdom curated by Poseidon”—offers a $2,500 bottle of Fillico Jewelry Water. The most expensive water ever sold, Acqua di Cristallo, came in a 24-karat-gold bottle and cost $60,000.
I also happen upon Martin Riese, a water sommelier and internet sensation—in one video he berates the Coca-Cola Company for calling Vitamin Water “water.” (“This is obviously nothing else than a noncarbonated soda.”) In another viral video, he extols a water on sale at Walmart for 98 cents that has more electrolytes than Gatorade. Riese exuberantly offers to lead me in a virtual tasting. Only one of the six bottles he sends me is plastic—Fiji water, which I recognize from airport concessions. I had envisioned using my Stanley cup for tasting. But even before suggesting it, I can sense his disapproval. I set the barrel-size mug out of sight. “In wine tastings,” Riese explains, “you’re starting with a light Sauvignon Blanc and you’re ending up with a Bordeaux blend. This is the same with water. We are building our way up in minerality.” I pour myself a little Saratoga Spring. “Do you think it’s smooth on the palette, or is it bitter?” he asks. Smooth. “Do you think it’s easy to swallow, or is it super salty?” Easy. He explains total dissolved solids, or TDS, the compounds (calcium, magnesium, sodium, fluoride, etc.) water encounters before burbling up as drinking water.
We taste Fiji water—longer lasting on the tongue due to a high concentration of silica. Iskld ($43 for a 12-pack), from Denmark, has a clear flavor and smell. It tastes to me like soil, like the water that used to come from a natural spring under a blackberry bush beside our house in Maine. Its TDS—a combination of magnesium and calcium—is higher than the other two. Riese peppers our tasting with bits of wisdom. Alkaline water is a marketing ploy: “The pH of water doesn’t matter.” Our digestive systems are acidic by design. “You would get food poisoning every day otherwise,” he says. “There are some evil companies out there who are pulling way too much water out.” But the good ones, he says, work to conserve natural resources. Ararat water (TDS 2,478)—the one with more electrolytes than Gatorade—is my favorite yet, with small bubbles and light saltiness.
I have a second tasting scheduled, with water sommelier Doran Binder, who instructs me to swish each sample around in my mouth for five seconds to “calibrate” my palate and only then focus on the taste of the second sip. Binder’s own award-winning water, Crag ($18 for a 12-pack), when tasted thus, is silky as cream, though normally only available in the UK because its glass bottles are delivered to households that subscribe to the service. I spend the next week following Binder’s guidance, swishing around Fillico Jewelry Water, bottled from the Nunobiki spring in Kobe, Japan; I adore the marine saltiness of Vichy Catalan ($4); and in Ferrarelle ($5) I find what I believe to be the perfect water—naturally sparkling, with medium minerality.
But as Riese points out: “Mineral water is an epicurean experience.” If you want to prioritize ecological concerns, both in terms of impact and what you ingest, “drink your tap water—it’s very important to me to say that,” he asserts. Travis Loop, founder of the nonprofit media outlet Waterloop, tells me that instances of tap-water contamination notwithstanding, all tap water is “exponentially better regulated” than bottled water. “Our water utilities have to be constantly tested for over 90 different contaminants. They are held to very, very rigorous standards.” Many cities test far more often than daily—Washington, DC, tests its water 30,000 times a year. A similar pattern exists in other countries as well: The quality of Italian bottled water is assessed every five years, for example, while the country’s tap water is tested every six months.
Bottled water in the US, Loop explains, is not regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency, but by the Food and Drug Administration. It isn’t held to the same bar as tap water, but to the FDA’s looser standards. Indeed, the UN’s water report contained four full pages outlining bottled-water contamination. According to Phoebe Stapleton, associate professor of the department of pharmacology and toxicology at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, there’s even reason to believe that tap water contains fewer nanoplastics: “The number of microplastics in tap water has been smaller than bottled water, so we would anticipate fewer nanoplastics as well.”
Have you ever wondered how astronauts drink water? “On the International Space Station, they’ve been drinking recycled water for over two decades,” says Loop. Only 30 miles from my house, I learn, the nonprofit educational organization Omega Institute for Holistic Studies has an Eco Machine that recycles all its wastewater. A 40-minute drive later, I’m facing a veritable tropical jungle, situated in a modern glass, wood, and concrete building—part of Omega’s recycling and filtration system, which uses plants, bacteria and microorganisms. The entire campus is water neutral, its aquifer recharged with every holistic visitor’s shower and linen change. After a tour, I bend to drink from the water fountain, trying to push from my mind all the possible waypoints for each sip.
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I admit to being extra vigilant for any potential symptoms that evening—until I find a recent study that rates the quality of reuse water, particularly reverse-osmosis-treated waters, as comparable to groundwater. I decide to rank the results of all my findings, worst to best. At the bottom, I put plastic bottled waters that are just packaged municipal water. Above them, I put tap water, and even with it, mineral water in glass containers. And then, at the top: recycled water? I’m not the only one who has cottoned on to this: Orange County, California, has been recycling its water since the 1970s, and today has the largest groundwater-replenishment system in the world. A collaboration among several government agencies will permit Los Angeles to recycle all of its wastewater by 2035.
In a turn that can only be described as ironic, to taste plain potable recycled water from a municipal system, I must have it shipped in plastic bottles from California. When it arrives, it could be whatever I’ve thoughtlessly purchased at a local gas station. This water, of course, has passed through innumerable homes and businesses and factories in Orange County. But I remind myself of the words of one Lucas van Vuuren, who helped develop the world’s first direct potable reuse facility, in Namibia: “Water should not be judged by its history, but by its quality.” The water is decisively drinkable. As Riese is sure to repeat in each of his videos: Water is not just water. This is water, finally, that everyone on earth can drink.