Another item not to buy: bottled water. Huge multinational corporations like Vivendi, Suez (both French), CocaCola and Pepsi are using their obscene profits from bottled water to fund their quests to privatize the world's water. Pepsi's Aquafina and Coke's Dasani brands are basically filtered tap water with a few chemicals added, and are not necessarily cleaner or safer than tap water. Their prices, however, are sometimes 10,000 times that of tap, and their packaging contributes to pollution in both its manufacture and disposal. If your tap water tastes bad or seems unsafe, work the local system to improve it, buy a filter or boil it if you have to, but don't give your money to companies that want to monopolize control of the world's water. (Source: Blue Gold, a book by Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke.) Companies like Monsanto, Cargill, ConAgra and Archer-Daniels-Midland want to control the world's food supply, and the four corporations mentioned above, along with a few others, want complete control over our water. If they control our food and our water, they control us. The Bush administration is doing everything it can, which is a lot, to assist these monsters. We must make sure that we don't aid them by buying their bottled water. (I'm going to have to give up my Diet Coke addiction, too, which will be much harder for me than giving up meat was.)