Water’s qualities show the need for quality water

As election day approaches, one of the topics right at the forefront of most parties’ agendas has been water.

There have been dire warnings about the state of our waterways and also concern that New Zealand is effectively ‘‘giving away’’ a precious resource to bottling companies that sell the water overseas.

The opposing parties are at loggerheads about how best to deal with these issues.

For much of the Western world, water has been something we have been able to take for granted for generations. It’s been literally on tap.

So, because I, like many other people in the developed world, have given very little thought to water during the course of my lifetime, I decided to give this liquid, which is essential to our survival, a bit more in-depth thought.

First, while we can live for a month without food but we’ll almost certainly expire within a week without water. Yet we are offhand about so many of its qualities.

For instance, we take for granted that water is colourless and odourless – but imagine if it wasn’t.

How would we wash our clothes if water was bright red and smelled of sardines, for instance? You could put your whites through the wash and at best they might come out pink and smelling more than slightly fishy.

So, we’d have to try to find some alternative colourless liquid for the daily wash but it would be a bit expensive if we had to run gin through the washing machine, although on reflection I suppose tonic might be a cheaper alternative.

And imagine trying to swim a length of the pool in a liquid that resembles the water in the bottom of the shower in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, Psycho. Our best hope for the next Olympic swimming champion would be someone named Dracula, although they would have to compete in night events only even with Games glory at stake, so to speak.

Our wine industry would have to have completely rethink its marketing strategies. Instead of reds and whites we would probably be offered reds and even redder.

We also take for granted that water is tasteless. This may not make water a very exciting drink, although it’s become very fashionable in recent years, but the winemakers would have another problem if, for instance, water tasted like Pepsi.

They might not relish paying royalties for water (it’s National, by the way, who insist on labelling this a tax rather than a justifiable production cost) but even if they overcame the problem of marketing sauvignon rouge, it would be a hard sell to get customers to try pinot coke.

Breweries would face their own challenges given that it takes more 90 litres of water to make the traditional pint. Even the most ardent beer drinkers would probably baulk at a glass that tasted like a soft drink and had a violently scarlet head on it.

Incidentally, according to research I’ve just conducted on water, Pepsi and Coco-Cola are already in the mix, so to speak. The largest selling brand of bottled water, Aquafina, is treated tap water bottled and marketed by Pepsi, while the company’s traditional rival, Coke, sells it under the label Dasani.

Making the bottled water fad even more ludicrous is the fact that in the United States 25 per cent of bottled water comes from municipal supplies. Yes, big multinationals certainly know how to tap into a good thing when they see it.

No one can argue that we in New Zealand certainly need to treasure our water resources far more because at least 400 million people in the world live in regions with severe water shortages.

Yet, surprisingly, there is still the same amount of water on Earth as there was millions of years ago.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that less than 1 per cent of water is drinkable. Most of the Earth’s surface water is either salty or frozen.

So we should do our utmost to safeguard this precious resource because in the words of Benjamin Franklin: ‘‘When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.’’