Bottled water court decisions give us quick glimpses into the sources of bottled water. For example:

* The Nestl company, which bottles water under several well-known labels, fought ferociously in court to retain its rights to appropriate water from the Great Lakes to put in bottles to sell to you and me. When Michigans government instituted a new law that allows Nestl Corporation to continue taking up to 250,000 gallons per day, and sell them at a markup well over 240 times its production cost, Nestl dropped the court battle.

* In Vermont, Poland Spring (also a Nestl product) was brought to court with a complaint that the bottled water in Poland Spring came not from “some of the most pristine and protected sources deep in the woods of Maine,” as advertised, but from other sources. In fact, on occasion, the water was trucked in from an unknown source out of state! But the court reasoned that Congress and the FDA made a conscious choice to allow states to regulate bottled water as long as their standards matched FDA standards. The bottled water met both standards, even though the source and advertised source were not the same.

What is bottled...