Friday 7 August 2009

Drinking water

Fortunately for those that care about health, the health industry woke up and issued the clarification that drinking water is necessary for health, and that drinking other - even healthy - stuff does in no way make up for it for health of body. And that soft drinks are not only not healthy but are extremely unhealthy has now been known for a while in various forms.

We drank water, most of the time, no matter what country we were in. In Germany however one was never served tapwater in restaurants, so if one was to pay an amount equivalent one might as well drink juice, and in restaurants we did. In the various neighbouring nations - France, Switzerland, Netherlands, UK et al - drinking water from tap was free and was served in restaurants. At home, most Germans either did not drink water or bought it - had it brought home by the company by the caseloads every week - and tried to change our ways, which we assumed was to make us spend money on the yet another unnecessary expensive German way of life. We did not buy water and often even carried tap water from home in bottles with us.

Now we are in a country where spending money on water is considered on the whole a fancy idea of those that have too much money which we don't certainly, and yet we have switched over to bottled water for everyday use. This has been due to a suspicion that the drinking water from the tap is not quite as good as it should be although where we live it is ground water, but then there is a highway less than a minute's walk from home and there are a couple of service stations within comfortable walking distance, even apart from the animals roving about and other stuff going into ground water filtered only by the earth itself.

And then we found out that the drinking water from tap that we had taken for granted in UK was in fact possibly not fresh but a treated variety, after hearing about the Australian drought situation threatening such a step in the nation.

So quite ironically we have been buying drinking water in plastic bottles just as the green awareness for saving planet is in infinitescimally higher gear.