The designer water market could be the greatest snow job since the ice age.

Treated H2O from a faucet is virtually free, certifiably potable and plentiful.

But sensitive drinkers (nearly half the country) believe their tap water is yucky and/or risky.

They either pay to refilter spigot water, so they know it’s pristine, or they buy at premium prices eau-so-cool elixirs in bottles.

These imbibers are so smart they require smart water with rousing stories.

They sip prehistoric Berg Water, harvested from Greenland icebergs formed 15,000 years ago. (Call it the beverage of choice for the prehistoric paleo diet.)

Perrier, the French mineral water, is drawn “naturally sparkling from the center of the Earth,” a sci-fi fantasy out of Jules Verne. Looking skyward, Palomar’s “pure spring water source is high on the mountain above the smog level.”

Or my favorite narrative, Valley Center’s SolarRain uses sun power to convert seawater into drinking water that’s delivered in biodegradable plastic bottles.

Slaking thirsts at maximum drinker cost is a multibillion-dollar industry, dominated by Nestle, Coke and Pepsi. It’s Mad Manly business to make bottled water the stuff of dreams.

Enter Encinitas Councilwoman Lisa Shaffer.

She wants to put the water genie back out of the single-use plastic bottle.

Her notion, which goes before the council tonight, is to wean Encinitas city events from bottled water. The goal: Send the signal that the product of the San Dieguito Water District, which the city operates, is plenty wholesome for the citizens of Encinitas.

Providing bottled water “sends the wrong message about how we should be behaving,” Shaffer says.

Shaffer appears to be on the cutting edge of environmental prohibitionism. From plastic bags, the hopscotch to environmentally damaging plastic bottles (how many are bobbing in the ocean?) is a natural.

Early this year, Concord, Mass., home of Henry David Thoreau, outlawed the sale of water in single-use plastic bottles, a possible harbinger of the shape of green bans to come at a city near you.

But I wonder how eager Americans, even enviro-puritans, are to trust their gullets to tap water?

Water is a test of faith, and we’ve been conditioned to seek extra proofs of purity, even if they’re irrational.

A few years ago, my wife and I traveled to Chile to see poet Pablo Neruda’s houses.

At restaurants, we were intrigued by the choice of agua sin gas or con gas (still mineral water or carbonated).

A friend explained that most Chileans opt for carbonation because it means something extra was done to the water. They worry that the still water might in fact be drawn from a faucet.

We went with the gas.


