Water, Water Everywhere
I think we all have our stories about water. I’m not talking about the sea or mountain lakes. By water I’m referring to that stuff we drink. I had never drunk water out of anything but the tap until 1965 when my family moved to a little town in Maine called Poland Spring. We spent three weeks at the Poland Spring Inn while our temporary house was being readied. I distinctly recall the conversation with the Inn’s bartender where he explained that the waters of Poland Spring had been bottled and sold by Hiram Ricker since 1859. That spring proved to be the basis of Poland Spring turning from a minor stop on the Post Road north from Boston to Bangor to becoming a major resort for the well-heeled of the Northeast. When I asked what made the water so special, the bartender just laughed and said the same thing that made snake oil so special. In its literature, Nestle, who owns Poland Spring now, says that all of its water comes from that little spring in the old Pump House on the northern side of the hill on which the Poland Spring Resort used to sit (it burned down in 1976 in a magnificent display of Bicentennial arson). But in 2017, the FDA participated in a class action lawsuit against Nestle and Poland Spring Water (then the largest bottled water sold in the U.S.) wherein they claimed that the spring in Poland Spring had been depleted 50 years prior. That would have been in 1967, when I lived in Poland Spring. You would have thought I might have heard of that since there were only a few hundred of us living on that hill in those days.
When I moved to Rome, Italy in 1968, I ordered a bottle of mineral water. I almost gagged. It was thick with minerals, but mostly it was carbonated. That was a new one on me. Poland Spring Water was special because it was devoid of minerals and it was decidedly not carbonated. It seems that Perrier had started bottling “naturally” carbonated water in France starting in 1863. It had started to really take off in the 1930’s, just in time for the world to focus on other problems than whether it liked its water with or without bubbles. In Italy, the Poland Spring or Perrier Spring was in the town of Fiuggi at the base of the Apennine Mountains southeast of Rome. Fiuggi is not only home to a famous spa, but also the source of the water by the same name and possessing a strong diuretic quality that is considered highly medicinal. We got used to drinking Acqua de Fiuggi in those days, and our kidneys were never better.
When I started in the banking business in the mid-seventies, Perrier was just becoming “a thing” to drink in New York City. I used to cover banks and financial institutions in New England. I recall driving through Poland Spring on my way from Portland to Bangor and chuckling to myself that old Saul Feldman, who owned the resort when I lived there would be rolling over in his grave if he knew that he had missed the boat on bottled water. It turns out that Nestle didn’t buy the brand until 1992 and it was not too late to dominate the bottled water market in the U.S. if you had the marketing muscle of the Swiss conglomerate behind you. I recall driving through the town of Greenwich, Connecticut, that toney suburb of New York where all the rich bankers (and soon the even richer hedge fund managers) lived, when all of a sudden there was an accident that caused a Perrier truck to overturn and spill all its bottled contents across the mix of asphalt and broken green glass. We joked that this tragedy would ruin the weekend for many a Greenwich housewife.
Flash forward to 2008 when I went to my youngest son’s eighth-grade science fair and learned that plastic water bottles were the bane of the existence of the environment. Then in 2011 my daughter ran her first New York City Marathon, something I have a great deal of respect for since I remember how hard it was to run three miles when I ran a bit in my youth. The thing that sticks out in my mind from watching her run through Brooklyn, where she and her family now live, is the massive number of plastic water bottles and plastic cups littering the marathon course at one of the many water stations. Since then we all know that the world has declared anybody that drinks water from plastic bottles to be a killer of sea life. These days, by wife will confront any vendor or restaurant that will offer its clientele a plastic straw rather than a paper or decomposable plant starch straw. I understand the big Chinese company that dominates the straw business is thrilled with the anti-plastic sentiment. It turns out they are eating their competitor’s lunch by shifting to paper and starch, which costs too much in retooling for the smaller companies to mimic. And the great thing for them is that the margins on paper and starch are about 5X the margins on plastic.
The other day I saw an article about a recent massive gift given to Cal Tech by Lynda and Stewart Resnick of $750 million for environmental research to combat Climate Change. That is the second largest gift ever to an academic institution, bested only by Michael Bloomberg’s gift of $1.8 billion given to Johns Hopkins University for the express purpose of providing scholarships to underprivileged and worthy young men and women. Let me start by saying how much I admire these important and game-changing gifts for such worthy causes by people who recognize that this sort of wealth-sharing is critical for the world to progress. The thing of note in the case of the Cal Tech gift is that the Resnicks have been and still are very controversial business people.
The Resnicks own the Wonderful Company, which owns Fiji Water, POM (the Pomegranate juice brand), Wonderful Pistachios, Wonderful Almonds, Wonderful Halos (tangerines) and several vineyards and flower delivery businesses. The Wonderful Company, in addition to being a significant contributor of the plastic water bottle problem (and from my experience with the square Fiji bottles, I would suggest they each have more plastic in them than other, thinner bottles), is also noteworthy as the single biggest user of scarce water in California, specifically in their farming operations in the Central Valley. The family, that lives in Beverly Hills, has been quite paternalistically philanthropic in giving back to the constituents of the Central Valley where they operate. That should not be ignored in the body of evidence of the family’s overall good/bad adjudication. Nevertheless, throwing coins to the masses is generally not a good balancing act for all the economic pillage that has occurred over the years by many capitalists. But giving $750 million back to address the challenge of climate change would seem to be one of the most meaningful and well-directed “make things right” moves I can recall seeing from an otherwise capitalistic family. Bravo.
It is interesting that when asked for the justification for the gift, Lynda Resnick stated clearly that her grandchildren had become quite militant about the importance for their family to give money for that specific purpose. This is meaningful in that they are the true and indisputable owners of these monies and they see the importance of saving the planet for all (not just for themselves) and are prepared to forego the riches of their grandparent’s plunder of the earth to help fix the earth. Double Bravo.
P.S. Kim and I went to another SAG/AFTRA premier of Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman today. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Ray Romano and Bobby Cannavale were there to discuss the movie (Joe Pesci was not there). The Director’s Guild staff set a bottle of Fiji Water at each chair except one. At Robert DeNiro’s chair they set a glass of water. As the celebrities were leaving, I pointed to De Niro and got his attention and I said, “thanks for refusing the plastic water bottle” and he gave me a thumbs-up. The world is changing bit by bit.