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