Arwa Mahdawi, a writer for The Guardian, recently made a shocking discovery: her trendy stainless steel and silicone water bottle, the kind everyone at her gym carries, was harboring a disgusting secret. After a year of neglecting to properly clean the bottle - due to the “faff” of dealing with its gasket, straw, and dishwasher-unfriendly parts - she finally looked inside and found mold. This is what happens when you assume water is clean and forget that flavored electrolytes are essentially a five-star buffet for bacteria.
Mahdawi recalls living with a man in her 20s who believed you didn’t need to wash towels because you used them when clean - a man, she notes, who graduated from both Oxford and Cambridge. She teased him mercilessly for his nitwittery. Now, she confesses she is also a nitwit. The irony is thick enough to scrape off with a sponge.