Water from your tap is not only hundreds of times cheaper than bottled water, it tastes just as good.
That was the conclusion of several dozen pedestrians who were asked to compare New York City tap water with Pure Life and Poland Spring bottled water in a blind taste test in front of the Water Store on Southern Boulevard on Nov. 2.
Several local groups participated in the event to call attention to what they call aggressive marketing campaigns launched by multinational companies that target minority communities to buy bottled water, even though reports regularly find New York City tap water among the nation’s safest.
A recent study by a national pediatric group found that Latino parents are three times likelier to buy bottled water for their children than to use water from the faucet.
The Water Store, one of only three stores in the country that sells nothing but good old H20 in bottles and containers, is owned by the international food and beverage company the Nestle Corporation, which sells bottled water around the world.
“To our surprise, most people found the public water was better,” said Pablo Gomez, founder of the Morrisania-based Hondurenos contra SIDA, one of the groups that participated in the “tap water taste challenge.”
Gomez added that corporations try to push bottled water on poor people in poor countries as well as low-income neighborhoods in developed countries, like Hunts Point.
“One of our big worries is that when the World Bank lends to poor countries, it always insists those countries allow their water supplies to be privatized. That’s a slap in the face to citizens,” he said.
The “tapwater challenge” was organized by a Massachusetts-based group called Corporate Accountability International, which for years has worked to turn the tide against bottled water as part of a campaign it calls Think Outside the Bottle.
At the end of the weekday event, the group presented a note to the manager of the Water Store.
“We delivered a message to the Nestle Store for their CEO. We told him ‘no more’ to this aggressive marketing campaign,” said Erin Diaz from the Massachusetts group.
Pure Life, one of the brands of water sold in the Water Store, is nothing more than New York City water taken directly from the tap and sold to consumers, she added.
Calls to Nestle’s corporate headquarters for comment were not returned.