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Foodies Like tap water
Giles Coren - on bottled water in restaurants.
If I am not offered tap water before mineral water, restaurants will be penalised
It is two years to the week since this column went zero tolerance on organic meat and sustainable fish — introducing the unique “meat/fish” category into its elaborate points-scoring system — and in that time menus have improved remarkably, at least at the middle and top ends of the market. So now I’m going after mineral water.
I touched on this the other week, in my review of Acorn, the eco-friendly restaurant in King’s Cross, but now I am going to do more than touch it. I am going to grasp it, embrace it, hold it like I’ll never let it go.
Mineral water is a preposterous vanity. It is flown and shipped around the world, from France and Norway at best, from Japan and Fiji at worst. It is bottled in glass that is mostly thrown away and is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic which never, ever, decomposes and just goes to landfill or ends up in one of the “plastic patches” the size of Texas currently gyring in our oceans.
Food snobs and restaurant critics make a big song and dance about mineral waters they like and don’t like. New York’s Ritz-Carlton even caters to the whim of abstemious punters with a dedicated water list and sommelier.
The vanity of it! While half the world dies of thirst or puts up with water you wouldn’t piss in, or already have, we have invested years and years, and vast amounts of money, into an ingenious system which cleanses water of all the nasties that most other humans and animals have always had to put up with, and delivers it, dirt-cheap, to our homes and workplaces in pipes, which we can access at a tap.
And yet last year we bought three billion litres of bottled water. 3,000,000,000 litres! I have no idea how much that is. But it seems a lot.
Especially when we were fooled into buying it because of labels that said “pure as an alpine stream”, “bottled at the foot of a Mexican volcano” or “cleansed for three million years beneath a Siberian glacier”. What morons we are.
We spent £2 billion on the stuff. And then we grumble about water metering and annual domestic bills of a couple of hundred quid for water that is just as good, and whose consumption by us is unlimited. Those two billion pounds could go some way to mending the odd leak, don’t you think? Towards digging the odd reservoir?
From the restaurants’ point of view it is just a clipping system. It’s more free money. The mark-ups are bigger even than they are on wine. You’ll pay four to five pounds in most posh London restaurants for stuff no different, no different at all, from what you brushed your teeth in that morning (not leaving the tap on while doing so, I hope). The result is billions of unnecessary food miles, non-biodegradable waste, millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, more urban pollution, hell in a handcart.
From now on, if a restaurant does not offer me tap water, politely, unsarcastically, and before they offer mineral water, then they will be penalised. The only bottled water I will tolerate will henceforth be Belu – sourced and bottled in Shropshire, sold in glass or fully degradable plastic made from a corn derivative which can be composted back to soil in 12 weeks, and all of whose profits go to fund drinking-water projects in India and Africa and river-cleaning projects in Britain.
I will introduce a new category to my scoring system, a fourth, since I can’t very well get rid of “meat/fish”, “cooking” or “other” without ballsing everything up, and I will call it “water”. And restaurants which serve only tap, or tap and Belu, will score ten out of ten.