Remember when drinking water came from the tap? You may have to reach back into the recesses of your memory, but long ago, humans used to have a readily available and basically free resource known as “city water.” It wasn’t fancy, it may have had a slightly metallic aftertaste, but it guaranteed you wouldn’t die of dehydration — which, in the age before Sodastreams, Pellegrino, artisanal ice cubes, and the devil’s plastic bottles, was exactly the point.
A new parody from filmmaker Paul Ricco makes us long for those simple days before the artisanal food craze turned once perfectly fine humans into kale-munching, mustache-growing, water-curating yuppie stereotypes.
As NPR’s The Salt wrote:
The film features the Timmy Brothers, who peddle bespoke drinking water, like Batch #1402, which contains Mississippi River water, Lake Pontchartrain water and a dash of East River water.
Where Ricco sees parody, others see opportunity. The Los Angeles eatery with the difficult to pronounce name Ray’s and Stark Bar has an extensive water menu, with offerings from a $9 bottle of Perrier (yes, the same Perrier you can get for $2 at 7-11) to a $20 bottle of Berg, which is “harvested” from 15,000-year-old Greenland glaciers and “melted under strict purity guidelines.” Please, stop.
It gets worse. “Water is essential to life,” the menu reads. “But are all waters the same? The answer is no. Martin Riese, General Manager and Water Sommelier of Ray’s & Stark Bar, has curated a water selection that demonstrates the difference in taste between twenty different waters sourced from various regions of the world. Terroir affects water just like wine. Let us take you on a global journey of water.”
NO, we will not let you take us on a global journey of water, Martin Riese, and we do not need a goddamn water sommelier. What we need is some rain to fall from the sky and fill up city reservoirs so that when this trend inevitably dies, we’ll still have something left to drink. Although it would be cool if tap water tasted like La Croix.
