A picture of women & children carrying containers of water on their heads is one of our enduring images of Third World poverty.
But we in the affluent world also carry an awful lot of water around, usually in supermarket trolley, shopping bag or the boot of the car. We rarely do it on our heads.
I am not talking about the strange conviction that water from plastic bottles is somehow better than, chemically superior to, & therefore better for our health than, the stuff that emerges from our kitchen tap, even when the liquid in the bottle comes out of a factory tap & is labelled as table water.
But we do carry water in ever increasing quantities, disguised as stuff.
Back in the 50s or 60s great hopes were pinned on techniques of freeze-drying as a solution for problems of world hunger, by its preservative properties & through increasing international trade in food by cutting transport costs by reducing weight & bulk.
For a while mash meant Smash, peas came in Surprise packets, & Knorr Swiss gave us fresh vegetable soup without the need to peel anything except the packet.
These were welcomed by mothers who had grown used to the convenience of cake & pudding mixtures & fruit juice squashed in bottles & reconstituted at home. Welcomed not least because shopping necessitated the daily chore of carrying it all home in a basket.
But now we all have cars & are time poor, so we prefer to buy stuff that comes ready prepared with added water.
Bottles of fizzy drink
Cartons of juice ‘fresh’ or reconstituted in a factory
Liquid soup is fresher
Laundry detergent - powder gums up the tray in the washing machine, so liquid, please.
Bar of soap? No, bath or shower or handwash liquid
Milk that used to come to your door in an electric-powered vehicle now uses its weight in your boot to reduce, at the margin, the miles you get for each gallon of expensive petrol or diesel.
Then all these waxed or plastic waterproof containers have to be washed & squashed & sorted into the right bin so that they can be sent round the cycle again.
