Does this water taste like cyanide to you?

Obviously, I’m a label watcher. Whenever I’m bored on a bus, in a line, or on the can, and there isn’t any acceptable reading material within reach, I start reading labels

I was reading the label of my Bangladeshi-bottled water today and came across a few frightening things in the mineral composition list. It included such lovely death-bringing, birth-defect-giving minerals such as Arsenic and Cyanide. Now I’m no chemist, but I’ve seen enough spy films to know that cyanide isn’t the peachiest of substances.

Nil – thankfully, that’s the quantity of arsenic and cyanide in the water. But what disturbs me is that the bottler here in Dhaka felt the need or was required to list these items.

How much arsenic and cyanide am I being exposed to elsewhere?

Why stop the list at this? Why not include rat poison, plutonium, and fecal matter?

Maybe, overtime, if I’m exposed to cyanide in small amounts, I’ll become immune to it. And someday when I’m wrapped up in a deadly game of espionage where, in order to maintain my cover, I have to drink a glass of water that I know is laced with cyanide, all of this will be worth it.