Hygiene is overrated
The No. 1 topic in German households is saving water. Because in order not to unduly deprive industry in its important agriculture and livestock farming of the equally cheapest and most valuable resource, the decision-makers in the economic and utility companies have been suggesting to us for years that we should turn the water glass upside down twice before drinking it.
It is easy for anyone to calculate that 1000 litres of water are needed to produce a kilo of beef: What the cow drinks in the course of its rearing in relation to its slaughter weight, the precipitation on the pasture whose grass it chews, the water in the mixing machines used to build the barn and not to forget the amount of coffee that the farmer as well as the truck driver drinks before the processed meat lands juicy red in the display.
But the fact that one litre of cow's milk already requires more than 270 litres of water has been kept quiet until now. And alternative products like almond milk are even better: one litre of almond milk consumes over 320 l of water in production.
On Alcatraz, a rocky island in the bay off San Francisco, named after St. Francis of Isko, which became famous because the first lighthouse on the US West Coast was built there, the importance of drinking water is great. For at the latest since a film was made there in the 1970s about a prison break attempt, in which the crew's problems were subsequently worked into the script that seawater was used to flush toilets, which corroded the pipes and made them brittle, thus allegedly making the faked break possible in the first place, only treated or direct groundwater from the manure-contaminated wells is fed into the supply pipes for industrial and drinking water, which have always been separate, so that this does not happen in the millions and millions of households in the German coastal regions of Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and Saxony-Anhalt.
Already since the last plague outbreak seven years ago, the concept of fresh water supply has improved significantly. Instead of investing in the purity of water, the pipes were rehabilitated. This is financially costly, but still better than measures that would benefit the consumer.
Permit requirement for wells in one's own garden
If you dig yourself a pit, you are far from being allowed to enter it. In Germany, the rule is that one's own land does not extend to the centre of the earth, as is the case in the USA, for example, which made the wealth of the oil magnates - famous from Dallas (Larry Hagman would have turned 90 on 21 Sept.) - possible, but the earth and everything in it from about one metre, but at the latest at the groundwater line, belongs to the state or the church - or both, it is not known whether this is separate.
It would be completely exaggerated to introduce something like the purity law for water, as with beer in Bavaria to establish it as a basic foodstuff. The rumour that this same plague, on the occasion of the introduction of VAT in 1968, ensured that the Free State could continue to consume barley juice at a reduced rate, since babies at that time could not drink polluted water or mother's milk and were instead raised on beer, persists as does the theory that the regulations for the drinkability of water must be complied with (odourless and tasteless, limits for drug residues, chlorine, nitrate and other chemical happiness-inducers).
But what do these old stories have to do with our water consumption in the here and now? In fact, we use too little water because the cost of treating it is higher than pumping it under high pressure directly back into the treatment plants because of the long standing times in the rotten pipes. Only in the process it doesn't pass through the water meters in the homes, which worries the utilities (presumably that's why they're called that).
But we wouldn't be the satirical editorial team at Alterix if we didn't know what the solution was: Omit personal hygiene, don't flush after going to the toilet, clean dishes in the sun and dry them. Hygiene is overrated. After all, no one can claim that others might be bothered by the body odour that develops; because anyone who comes close to smells without a virus- and odour-proof mask is not allowed to speak out.