Whenever there is a disaster that puts people out on the street, bottled water is there. Be it flood, drought, hurricane, fire or water main break, bottled water is always around to save the day. The camera from news coverage of such events will often pan by several cases of bottled water — conveniently delivered for free from a far away place — as if to depict that safety has arrived. The bottled water industry has certainly done a good job in recent years of associating their product with emergencies. But do we really need bottled water in most emergencies?

Nestlé Waters Canada recently donated 7,800 bottles of water to an elementary school and a middle school that were both experiencing water woes; they had lead in their tap water. Naturally, Nestlé came to the rescue. While I couldn’t locate any symbolic footage from a local news source of children clinging to their safe bottles of water, I’m sure you can picture it. READ FULL POST

Lately, I feel like someone could slap a sticker on the Brooklyn Bridge that says, “This bridge is certified organic,” and get total buy-in from many consumers. Since most of us have no idea what would make a bridge sustainable, we would have no way of knowing if it’s truly organic or not. Even if the Brooklyn Bridge were certified sustainable by, let’s say, the National Bridge Inspection Standards (NBIS), we would need to inquire as to what standards were established for that certification and why. Most importantly, people we trust in the bridge business would all have to agree on those standards. They would also have to agree that those standards, if met, would allow a bridge to be certified sustainable. This all seems straightforward, yet we allow ambiguity to exist in the organic labeling of our food.  Look what’s been happening at the fish market… READ FULL POST

Food & Water Watch now proudly unveils the latest version of our Factory Farm Map, which charts the concentration of factory-farmed animals across the country.

It’s called the food “industry” for a reason. If you’ve seen Food Inc., you understand why. In that film, and here at Food & Water Watch, some careful analysis reveals the massive network of production and distribution that has become our food system. Thanks to advertising, marketing and fancy packaging, the images we create for ourselves of the places where our food comes from are often in direct contrast to the reality of where most of it is produced. Much of the time, we may be thinking farm, but we’re really getting factory. READ FULL POST