Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works. Hey, brain
Speaker 1: Stuff is Christian Seger. I'm going to answer a question
Speaker 1: for you, but you know what I'm gonna do. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna ask it for you first. Does water ever go bad?
Speaker 1: The answer actually is not really, but it depends on
Speaker 1: how you store it. If you take some water in
Speaker 1: a bowl or a vase or something that's open, and
Speaker 1: you leave it outside and then you come back after
Speaker 1: a few days it's hot and maybe you drink it,
Speaker 1: you'll have just drank a lot of well, probably algae, mosquito, larva,
Speaker 1: and just a bunch of crud that you probably don't want.
Speaker 1: It's stagnant water that's been left out to the elements,
Speaker 1: and that, in a sense, is water going bad. But
Speaker 1: if you have some water, say that you buy in
Speaker 1: like a bottle form that you never opened, and you
Speaker 1: store it for a few years, no, it's probably not
Speaker 1: going to go bad. But be warned. Water can leech
Speaker 1: stuff from its surrounding environment. So let's say that you've
Speaker 1: got an onion and you put it in one of
Speaker 1: those onion holder things that looks like an onion, but
Speaker 1: it's made of plastic. I don't know what those are.
Speaker 1: But if you have one of these holders for your
Speaker 1: onions and you put a gallon of water in there,
Speaker 1: it's gonna leach the onion flavors in your water. It's
Speaker 1: gonna taste like onions, and that's totally natural. It doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that there's anything actually bad going on, although that
Speaker 1: does also mean that water can leach chemicals from say
Speaker 1: the plastic container that it's in over time as well,
Speaker 1: So you're essentially drinking that plastic. And if you're going
Speaker 1: to drink bottled water fresh off the shelf the assembly line,
Speaker 1: and that bottled water that's just been sitting there for
Speaker 1: about a year, it's gonna have an equal amount of
Speaker 1: the same plastics leached into it. And it doesn't take
Speaker 1: a lot of time for that happen. So, you know,
Speaker 1: you could go without water if you're dying thirst and
Speaker 1: you just want to avoid drinking whatever plastics are in there.
Speaker 1: You know what, you can just suck up that water
Speaker 1: and drink those plastics and live and then, I don't know,
Speaker 1: maybe figure out how to get the plastics out of
Speaker 1: you later on. But you might be asking, hey, Christian,
Speaker 1: why would there be an expiration date on my bottle
Speaker 1: of water. Well, it turns out, in seven, New Jersey
Speaker 1: passed a law that said everything, all food stuffs, including water,
Speaker 1: which is actually considered a food by Jersey, has to
Speaker 1: have an expiration date of two years stamped right on there.
Speaker 1: And everybody who's making bottled water all the time said, look,
Speaker 1: we're not going to make a whole run of bottles
Speaker 1: just for New Jersey that have to have this stamp.
Speaker 1: We're just gonna stamp everything. It's more cost efficient and
Speaker 1: that makes more sense, and hence bottled water has an
Speaker 1: expiration date on it. Although New Jersey repealed that law
Speaker 1: as far as bottled water goes in two thousand and six,
Speaker 1: people still want it, though they expect it, and they're
Speaker 1: gonna say, what's up with this water? It doesn't have
Speaker 1: an expiration date on it. I'm not buying that. And that,
Speaker 1: my friends, is why water has an expiration date. And no,
Speaker 1: water doesn't really go bad as long as it stored
Speaker 1: in a correct place and kept sealed. Check out the
Speaker 1: brainstaff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and
Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com