Author goes to source of KC’s yummy water

Elizabeth Royte writes about the chain of life. In 2005, she published a book, Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, that followed the waste out of her Brooklyn home. Her most recent book examines a product brought in to millions of residences and offices: bottled water.

Americans consume 50 billion single-serve bottles of water a year. In Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, now in paperback, Royte describes how fashion, which once drove sales of bottled water, now threatens its growth. To some, toting a bottle of Evian is a social crime on par with driving a Hummer.

Much of Bottlemania is set in Fryeburg, Maine, a small town above a spring that Nestlé uses to produce Poland Spring. Royte also visited Kansas City, Missouri, and toured the city’s water treatment plant, where engineers run the Big Muddy through an impressive array of filters and processes before it reaches our taps.

Of all the municipal water works in the country, why Kansas City’s?

I wrote about KC’s water because I wanted to compare it with New York

City’s water, which is famously tasty and comes from a fairly well

protected watershed. Kansas City starts with water from a much dirtier

source — the Missouri River — cleans it up, and also wins taste

awards.