Ian McEwan critiques obsessive water bottle trend

Helen Coffey, The Independent

As I write these words, I am all too aware of a benign but looming presence on my desk beside me. She’s always there, at the edge of my vision: a 1.5 litre — it would be fair to call her “giant” — reusable plastic bottle I have nicknamed “Big Bertha” on account of her heft and volume. She started off as a kind of joke, a fun way to encourage me to chug a bit more H2O during the day. This is largely thanks to her “made in China, purchased in Asda” design, resulting in badly translated messages next to accompanying time stamps along one side. “9am feeling bullish”, reads one; “11am mind your goal”, states another. And, my personal favourite, “3pm keep challenge”.

But what started as something frivolous has become a way of life. I now take Big Bertha everywhere I go, despite her unwieldy girth. I feel mildly panicked if I don’t have access to her at any given point during the day, and supremely disappointed in myself if I don’t manage to “keep challenge” and imbibe her contents in full within each allotted 16-hour period. If I do forget her, there’s every chance I’ll buy a disposable water bottle on the move. I’ve gone from being someone who rarely thought about thirst to believing that feeling mildly parched is nothing short of unendurable.

Perhaps, on reflection, I’m living proof that Ian McEwan is right — and that the modern obsession with water bottles is “deranged”. The British Booker Prize-winning novelist and screenwriter made the comment at this year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival, reports The Telegraph, pointing to a generational divide that’s been hidden in plain sight for the past few years.

“Thirty years ago, nobody had bottles of water. You had a drink from the tap when you got home,” he said. “And suddenly we were persuaded that you can’t go 10 minutes without being thirsty. This is a derangement. Millions of plastic bottles everywhere, as if being thirsty was a terrible affliction. It only is in extremes. Just wait 10 minutes and go home and have a cup of tea.” He’s not wrong; the water bottle trend really is an incredibly recent development, arguably started by millennials but spearheaded by Gen Z. As a kid, I don’t recall anybody having a water bottle – hydration simply wasn’t a big deal. And when you did drink, it was from a plastic tumbler or a glass. The older generations still live and die by these rules in many cases (there’s even a popular post on the subreddit “BoomersBeingFools” that reads: “I recently found out my dad doesn’t drink any water at all. He’s about 73 and has been living his life on sweet tea and sodas!”)

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when we started to become obsessed with the water bottle, but the stratospheric rise of the Stanley cup — trendy stainless steel flasks that sell for £40 a pop, minimum — provides a rough timeline. The brand itself may be more than a century old, but the signature “Quencher Tumbler” didn’t come out until 2016 and started gaining real traction with consumers around 2020, when the company began using influencers to tout their wares via social media campaigns. Then, in 2023, a star was officially born: a woman’s car caught fire, but her Stanley cup remained intact with the ice still inside, unmelted. The video went viral; the brand’s revenue leapt from approximately $73m in 2019 to around $750m that year.

Alongside this sudden surge in popularity, the #WaterTok movement was swiftly developing too. This TikTok trend saw lifestyle girlies in leggings with perfect contouring invest an alarming amount of time and money on their own hydration “routines”, complete with expensive receptacles, varying styles of ice and flavours to endlessly enhance the humble cup of water. Just as with the blink-and-you-missed-it infiltration of mobile phones, before you knew it, everyone seemed to have a water bottle permanently glued to their hand. “How did it come about that we accepted this?” asked a bemused McEwan. “You see people walking down the street with a bottle. If this was 1950, someone would think, ‘What is that person doing with a bottle of water?’ It’s a very small thing, in a sense, but it’s a symbol of how life can change without us really noticing.”

There are, of course, plenty of advantages to drinking enough water — though what constitutes “enough” is even up for debate. Age, sex, climate and the amount of physical activity you do will all have an impact. The UK government’s Eatwell Guide recommends aiming for six to eight cups or glasses of fluid a day (a somewhat woolly piece of guidance considering there’s no real indication of how big a glass should be). According to Bupa, adults need about 2 to 2.5 litres of fluid a day. In both cases, note the use of the word “fluid” — which means it doesn’t even have to be water. Tea, coffee, juice, milk and other drinks also count, while you can get some fluid from food such as soup, fruit and vegetables. (It’s good news for people like Claudia Winkleman; the Traitors presenter famously hates water, revealing on a podcast: “I don’t like or believe in water, I won’t have it... I’ve never knowingly had water.”)

Drinking enough fluid lubricates our joints and eyes, helps our digestive system function and keeps our skin healthy, according to the British Dietetic Association. Becoming dehydrated, meanwhile, can cause headaches, constipation and kidney stones. Clearly, adequate hydration is important, and guzzling on the go undoubtedly helps us meet our daily minimum. But I do also take McEwan’s point. As with so many other activities, social media has transformed this most humdrum and mundane of human tasks, catapulting it from run-of-the-mill to a curiously attractive “lifestyle choice”, complete with matching accessories and status symbols. It’s not just water. Just look at the proliferation of compartmentalised boxes, organisational “systems” and label-making paraphernalia promoted by #CleanTok, for example – it is no longer enough to simply have a clear out. These days, it has to become your entire personality. It’s all become a bit, well... extra.

While Big Bertha will remain part of my life until, let’s face it, someone gifts me a Stanley cup, maybe I could try chilling out a bit and leaving her at home. Just sometimes. And maybe the real “KEEP CHALLENGE” lies in realising we won’t actually drop dead if we wait until we get to a tap.