Boing Boing: What it takes to bring you Fiji water

Every bottle of Fiji Water goes on its own version of this trip, in reverse, although by truck and ship. In fact, since the plastic for the bottles is shipped to Fiji first, the bottles’ journey is even longer. Half the wholesale cost of Fiji Water is transportation–which is to say, it costs as much to ship Fiji Water across the oceans and truck it to warehouses in the United States than it does to extract the water and bottle it.That is not the only environmental cost embedded in each bottle of Fiji Water. The Fiji Water plant is a state-of-the-art facility that runs 24 hours a day. That means it requires an uninterrupted supply of electricity–something the local utility structure cannot support. So the factory supplies its own electricity, with three big generators running on diesel fuel. The water may come from “one of the last pristine ecosystems on earth,” as some of the labels say, but out back of the bottling plant is a less pristine ecosystem veiled with a diesel haze (…)

My personal experience with Fiji Water: I had been aware of the product on the periphery of my “stuff that’s available to buy” vision, but had one of those “bonding” moments with it after a truly awesome massage. This was in the days immediately after Mom died, and I went to this place in Salt Lake that promised a  nice experience with hot lava rocks and scented oils.

Oh, boy, howdy, that massage was a spiritual experience. I won’t say it was a spiritual awakening, because it actually put me to sleep for a few minutes near the end… and since I hadn’t slept in days, that was saying something. I floated out of the massage place afterwards, promising to drink plenty of water, and since I actually had a raging thirst, bought a bottle of Fiji Water from the nearest place I could find, a little espresso-snack shop attached to the local chain bookstore. And it was very soft in the mouth and refreshing, especially compared to Salt Lake’s extemely hard water.  I fell a little in love with it that day, but that was because of the massage. It may have flushed a lot of toxins, too.

That said, I won’t be buying imported water again, because there’s no justifying buying it based on the description above, no matter how clean the taste and soft the mouthfeel. That goes for Fiji Water, Panna water (the stuff I had to find for Synergy Brass Quintet when they performed concerts at Holy Innocents),  or anything of that ilk. I don’t think there’s any reason to stop purchasing imported foods, because that to me is different – but water is water.