What's Colorless and Tasteless And Smells Like . . . Money?

"The resolution is not in the public interest and could discourage consumers from drinking bottled water, which is a safe, healthy, conveniently-available food product," the International Bottled Water Association said in a statement. The industry group cited Shirley Franklin, mayor of Atlanta -- home to Coca-Cola Co., which sells Dasani -- who "expressed concern that even a non-binding resolution might hamper public comfort at civic events such as marathons, concerts and other public gatherings."

By undermining confidence in public drinking water, the bottled-water industry has helped reduce support for repairs and upgrades to the nation's public water infrastructure, said environmentalist Elizabeth Royte, author of "Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It."

"People who drank bottled water first drank it because it was chic," Royte said. "But then it went from fashion to fear, and most of the time the fear of water is not well founded."

People who are worried about the quality of their home and office water supplies can get their water tested and install filters at a small fraction of the financial and environmental costs of bottled water, Royte said.

"There are hundreds of millions spent marketing bottled water as pure and clean and better, and that implies the tap water is not pure and clean and better," she said. "Public utilities do not have PR budgets and do not have money to advertise their wares and tell us their water is pure."

Wilk, the Indiana University anthropologist, said water has always been an unusual product. From ancient times, it has been deeply entwined with cultural beliefs; many civilizations have had notions of "holy water."

Decades ago, European colonialists in Africa had water from their homelands shipped to them because they believed that it was the only water that could keep them healthy. Today, many people believe that water from distant places is better than water that is locally produced, and the result is that a large portion of the bottled-water trade is reciprocal: There are people in Mexico, for example, who want bottled water from the United States, while some Americans prize bottled Peñafiel water from Mexico. And in Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove," a 1964 comedy about nuclear war, Gen. Jack D. Ripper launches a war of mutual annihilation on the Soviet Union because he thinks Communists have undermined the water supply.

What the bottled-water industry has done, Wilk argues, is capitalize on two age-old magical beliefs -- that contact with "impure water" can harm you, and that contact with "pure water" can heal you.

"People pay thousands of dollars for hundred-year-old wine that tastes like vinegar," Wilk said, citing other examples of human beliefs that may seem irrational. "People pay several thousand dollars for a cow that is cut in half and suspended in formaldehyde, but we call it art so you pay thousands for it.

"In that sense," he said, "water is a quintessentially magical substance."