Does water go out of date?

You know this was something that I've asked about at work, but nobody could really give me an answer there either.

From AOL Finance News:

A Little Secret About Bottled Water
Containers Say It Expires,
But Evidence for That Is Scant;

...

But does water really spoil? Despite the labels reminding consumers to drink up, there is virtually no evidence that drinking water beyond the expiration date has any health impact at all. The Food and Drug Administration considers bottled water to have an "indefinite shelf life." Even the bottled-water industry is hard-pressed to justify the labels.

"There's no real rationale," says Jane Lazgin, a spokeswoman for Nestle Waters North America Inc., a division of Nestle SA that bottles brands including Poland Spring and Ice Mountain, and imports European waters such as Perrier and Vittel. The practice "is not health-based," she adds.

Still, some shoppers are heeding these directives. If bottled water is past its expiration date, "there's probably something wrong with it," says John Bohan, a 39-year-old father of three in Los Angeles who drinks only bottled or filtered water. "I would drink bad tap water over post-dated bottled water."

There must be something wrong with it, they wouldn't just put those dates on the package to get you to buy more water, now, would they? I mean, since other things go out of date, shouldn't water? Of course not, otherwise our entire water supply would have gone out of date a loooong time ago. I mean, look at all that water just sitting out there in lakes and ice and whatnot, we better drink that up before it goes all bad.

Who do we have to blame this on?

To some degree, the fact that bottled water carries expiration dates can be blamed on New Jersey, the only state that officially requires it. That regulation dates back to 1987, though it's not completely clear what prompted it. The New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services says only that: "The intent of the law was to protect the safety and quality of drinking water."

The industry says that, given the New Jersey law, it's easier -- and cheaper -- for water companies to stamp dates on every bottle, whatever the destination, than to do it selectively. "That's why you'll see it, so you don't have a hodge-podge of labels going to different states," says Stephen Kay of the International Bottled Water Association, an industry trade group. (A handful of other states, including New York, Michigan and Louisiana, require manufacturers to stamp packages with the bottling date, but don't insist on expiration dates.)

I bet this has something to do with the mob. It's not like anything would taste any better no matter what you do in Jersey, what with the Jersey smell. It's pretty much like anything in Calhoun, TN tastes like rotten eggs due to the Bowater Paper Mill there.

And there is one quote buried near the end of the story that I think needs a little attention.

"I don't think it would be a safety problem, but more of a quality issue," says Michael P. Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia. "We've had some water that tasted like stale milk."

If the water tastes like stale milk, then I'd lean towards it being stale milk and not water. I've never had any water that tasted remotely like milk, except for when I re-filled that milk jug with tap water and then drank it. That tasted like milk, because it was partly milk.

Milk does expire, let me tell you.