It's clear that I am ahead of my time-have been for years. You see, I've been drinking bottled water for the past 30 years.

However, I don't spend $5 or more for a bottle of water with some high-toney French brand. My bottles are recycled soft-drink containers, rinsed out and filled from the kitchen tap. My bottle of water rests in that little cup-holder beside the seat of my pickup or in a cooler on the tractor.

If I had the time and marketing help, I might purvey our kitchen faucet into a real value-added merchandising system. My household water from the rural water district wells costs about a penny a gallon. But people would probably buy it with a cute label for several times that, if I put our tap water on the right market. I see bottles of water in the grocery store priced all the way from 80 cents to over $5 per gallon and there's often nothing on the label to indicate that it's anything but tap water.

You'd think that paying a premium price would buy water of exceptional quality. Not necessarily. Interestingly, water out of the faucet must meet EPA standards, while bottled water is subject to less rigorous purity standards, less frequent tests for bacterial contamination and may not be regulated at all.

In fact, if the label says the water is "from a municipal source" or "from a community water system," it's probably plain tap water, said Bob Broz, University of Missouri water quality specialist.

Still, Americans spend more than $7 billion a year on bottled water, and the evidence is pretty strong that they don't know what they're buying. Even if the stuff is called "Aquafina" (the Pepsi brand of bottled water), "Dasani" (a competing Coke product) or something else, it's still water.

Awhile back, in a tongue-in-cheek test in California, diners at a posh restaurant were given lists of bottled water with elegant-sounding names. Some diners paid over $6 per bottle, although all of the bottles were filled out back from the same garden hose.

One of the preferred bottled waters was labeled "L'eau Du Robinet." Unless my high school French is acting up on me, I believe that means "faucet water."

But, I wouldn't mind having a slice of that $7-billion market, so I may kick off my own bottled-water enterprise (perhaps with something called "Eau de Jacque") any day now.