Millions of bottles of water are consumed daily and often thrown into rapidly growing landfills when they're disposed of. Meanwhile individuals keep walking to their refrigerators to grab another cold bottle of water while their taps sit silently, virtually unused for drinking water. Why is that exactly?

Because sometime during the 90s, the companies that produce water executed what is arguably the greatest marketing campaign ever launched and somehow convinced naive (Evian spelled backwards) consumers that tap water was disgusting and all the cool, healthy people only drink water that comes from a glacier. Read on for columnist Giles Coren's take on the matter.

Since I first made my stand against bottled water in 2006 – incorporating penalty points for serving it into my restaurant ratings, vilifying its producers and mocking its consumers – consumption of the stuff has plummeted (probably). Far more restaurants than ever before offer tap water first and then bottled only as the Bling-Bling alternative. Punters who opt for the Perrier or Badoit now do so with a blush and an apology to diners at the next table.

In 2008 drinkers of bottled water are the new smokers.

Mineral water is a preposterous vanity. It is flown and shipped around the world, from France and Norway at best, from Japan and Fiji at worst. It is bottled in glass that is mostly thrown away and is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic that never decomposes and just goes to landfill or ends up in an ocean “plastic patch” the size of Texas.

Food snobs and restaurant critics make a song and dance about mineral waters they like and don’t like. New York’s Ritz-Carlton even caters to the whim of abstemious punters with a dedicated water list and sommelier.

The vanity of it! While half the world dies of thirst or puts up with water you wouldn’t p**s in, or already have, we have invested years and vast amounts of money in an ingenious system that cleanses water of all nasties and delivers it, dirt-cheap, to our homes and workplaces in pipes, which we can access at a tap.

In 2006 we bought three billion litres of bottled water. I have no idea how much that is. But it seems a lot. Especially when we were fooled into buying it because of labels that said “pure as an alpine stream”, “bottled at the foot of a Mexican volcano” or “cleansed for three million years beneath a Siberian glacier”. What morons we are.

In certain cases, water can actually have an unpleasant taste or smell and I realize that sometimes when you're on the go without a reusable bottle, buying a disposable one is far more appealing than drinking from an airport bathroom. But why is it we walk into a coffee shop - a place that probably makes the coffee we're about to drink with unfiltered water - and pay a grossly inflated price for something we wouldn't be charged for if we simply drank the "local brew" that comes from the tap? Giles is right, what morons we are. Hit the jump to read his full rant on the topic.

» Times Online