I’ve been drinking Brita-filtered water at home just about exclusively for over ten years (using the same original two pitchers, even; is that bad? – I do change the filters regularly, religiously). I just can’t drink tap water anymore:

• I’m bothered by the thought of drinking nasty germ-ridden municipal water. Yes, I know, Brita only filters out chemicals and doesn’t do anything for microbial agents. But growing up in a doctor-headed household, and now living in a family of doctors, it’s more natural for me to think in terms of germs instead of chemicals.
• I really do think the Brita-filtered water tastes better.

Why does Brita-filtered water taste better? Ostensibly, all the bad-tasting bad stuff is filtered out. And Brita marketing would like us all to think that.

But … what if there is some insidiously-applied taste agent included in the filter (alongside all that activated charcoal)? I looked on the outside of my box of filters, and on the shrink-wrap around each individual filter. The front of my 4-pack box of filters prominently reads:

Guaranteed to make your water taste better.

The back of the box reads:

The Amazing Brita® Filter – The Brita Filter’s activated carbon and ion exchange resin work together to filter your water so you get healthier, great-tasting drinking water.

Interesting. The taste of the water gets top billing, and removal of chemicals is only alluded to with the mention of “healthier” water. I found nothing resembling a “List of Ingredients” that you find on food items. I suppose that is reasonable, since the Brita filter is not “food”. And one might argue that the recipe for filter technology is some kind of proprietary trade secret, like Colonel Sander’s secret recipe, or Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi. But it also means that we all could be unknowingly drinking lightly-flavored vitamin water, or something worse …

I couldn’t find any other research into Brita filtration. The best I could come up with was some people using a Brita pitcher to make some deep-well vodka taste like something closer to Grey Goose (hey, I’ll have to try that some time) …

Conventional wisdom says that municipal water supplies are viable targets of terrorist attack, but if I were a trillionaire maniacal arch-villain bent on world domination via some water-soluble ingestible mind-controlling drug, I think I’d just buy Brita (the company) and use their filters as my delivery vehicle. And their US headquarters is just an hour away in Oakland …