According to a recent study in the Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine minority parents consume bottled water more often than white Americans and this has become a topic of discussion now. I wondered about these claims when I saw the post Why Minorities Love Bottled Water on theroot.com. Do minorities love bottled water? Who are we considering minorities?

The answer to the second question is what I suspected, minorities in this case are Blacks and Latinos, which could have been stated outright but for whatever reason wasn’t. So Blacks and Latinos love bottled water? I’m still not sure about that one, but apparently these stats don’t lie.

• Minorities consume bottled water more often than white Americans, and spend a greater proportion of their income (about 1%, compared to the 0.4% white Americans dole out) on this superfluous commodity every year.
• Latino and black parents were 3 times more likely to sate their children’s thirst with bottled water, compared with white parents.

So if this is all true it is incredibly sad because there are all these other stats like:

The article on theroot. com and its source article on forbes.com outline the reasons why Black and Latino consumers are buying so much of this product that didn’t even exist when my mom was my age. They say it’s the marketing and true indeed we have been heavily marketed to with Latino-specific bottled water brands, and celebrity endorsements of water brands like when Dasani enlisted TLC’s Chilli “to deliver its message of health and hydration to African-American mothers in a special Mother’s Day program.”

Moms are targeted since they’re often the only parent in many of Black and Latino households. These Moms also have a fear that tap water isn’t good, or good enough for their kids. Here’s what isn’t outlined in these articles at all: Why do people buy bottled water in the first place?
What’s wrong with the water in the first place that makes people so suspicious of it?
What are the possible differences in water quality in Black and Latino neighborhoods and white neighborhoods? What are the possible differences in water quality in neighborhoods of different classes?

Rather than pathologizing these communities for buying bottled water we should address the reasons why they bought it before they were targeted, why their drinking water is unsafe and why as a basic right clean water is under attack from so many angles worldwide and not just from privatization.
Pulling water to bottle, even if it’s mineral water, damages ecosystems by sucking water from underwater aquifers. Not to mention the toxins released in making the plastic bottles like nickel, ethylbenzene, ethylene oxide and benzene and the ones that leech into you water from the bottle when your water has been sitting in that bottle for who knows how long. Or the fact that you may be supporting dictatorships since you don’t know what’s going on the ground in Fiji.

There are so many parts to this and I fear we don’t understand why bottled water and what’s happening to the world’s water. I also fear this buying pattern, if it’s accurate, may stem from the desire to achieve equality by buying a product white consumers can buy that’s mainly expensive when the total cost is added up over time. I understand the desire for bottled water when your tap pours out brown or black water, leaves sediment when the tap is turned off or is flammable but the better solution is to get out water system fixed and polluters prosecuted. I’ll save my fears about the fluoride for another day and I will end this post with this:

If Black and Latinos can be targeted for buying bottled water surely Black and Latinos can be targeted with information about why bottled water is harmful for every living thing on this planet. We will be a part of that effort.
Src: theroot.com
forbes.com
livegreenseegreen.blogspot.com