SAN FRANCISCO
 Spigot water advocates take it to the bottle
 Marketed brands no better than city stuff in taste test
Steve Rubenstein, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
 
Water, a well-known beverage favored by billions, was once again
fooling the whole world Tuesday in San Francisco.

In another of those blind tastings designed to demonstrate what suckers
 water drinkers have become, ordinary tap water faced off against its
high-priced bottled brethren in head-to-head combat.

The idea, according to the earnest young organizers of the first-ever
Tap  Water Challenge, was to see if people could tell tap water from
the $1-a-bottle stuff.

The answer was, they couldn't.

"We're falling for something we shouldn't be falling for,'' said David
Assmann, deputy director of the San Francisco Department of the
Environment, paper cup in hand. "You really can't tell the
difference.''

Assmann had utterly failed to tell which of the paper cups full of
water placed before him was San Francisco tap water and which were the
bottled brands Aquafina and Dasani.

"People buy a lot of things they don't need,'' he said. "I wouldn't
call  bottled water a swindle, exactly, but it's certainly something
people are paying for without getting any benefit.''

One by one, passers-by in Justin Herman Plaza approached the testing
table at high noon and were presented with four cups, lettered A, B, C
and D. Two contained tap water, one contained Dasani and one contained
Aquafina. Test takers tried to match the cups with the source.

After two hours, the results were tallied. Only three people out of 32
identified all the cups correctly.

"What a total rip-off,'' said Rose Marie Klahn of San Francisco, a
bottled-water fan who couldn't tell her brand from the free stuff. "I
guess  bottled water doesn't taste as good as I thought it did. You're
basically paying for marketing. I'm going to have to give tap water
another chance.''

Mary Fleming, a San Franciscan who drinks tap water except when her
very particular mother comes over for a visit, said she may wind up
serving tap  water to her mom from now on, anyway.

"I'll run the water in the sink and fill the bottles,'' she said.

Andrew Adams of Corporate Accountability International, who helped
organize the show, said his group wants folks to "think outside the
bottle." Tap water challenges were held in seven other cities to call
attention to something called World Water Day, which is today.

Representatives of the bottled water companies weren't on hand to watch
Tuesday's contest, and could not be reached later for comment.

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission ran a similar taste test
in the plaza last May. In that one, half the tasters couldn't tell San
Francisco tap water from bottled water. Those who could said bottled
water was no better.

The hardest thing about running this year's Tap Water Challenge, Adams
said, was forking over $10 for the two cases of bottled water used in
the test.

"It was killing me to actually buy that stuff,'' he said. "But you
can't make an omelet without breaking eggs.''

E-mail Steve Rubenstein at srubenstein@sfchronicle.com.


frank arundel
"we can do better than this" Dr. Seuss

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