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from the all-the-cryptosporidium-you-can-drink dept.
At Rainbow Grocery, a cooperative in this city’s Mission District, one brand of water is so popular that it’s often out of stock. But one recent evening, there was a glittering rack of it: glass orbs containing 2.5 gallons of what is billed as “raw water” — unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water, $36.99 each and $14.99 per refill, bottled and marketed by a small company called Live Water.
“It has a vaguely mild sweetness, a nice smooth mouth feel, nothing that overwhelms the flavor profile,” said Kevin Freeman, a shift manager at the store. “Bottled water’s controversial. We’ve curtailed our water selection. But this is totally outside that whole realm.”
Here on the West Coast and in other pockets around the country, many people are looking to get off the water grid.
[...] Raw water is such a nascent business that there’s debate over what exactly to call the liquid. Daniel Vitalis hosts a podcast, “ReWild Yourself,” that promotes hunting for food and gathering water; he started the site called FindASpring.com to help people locate springs. He prefers the term “unprocessed water,” which echoes the idea of processed versus unprocessed food.
“I don’t like ‘raw water’ because it sort of makes people think of raw sewage,” Mr. Vitalis said. “When you say ‘live water,’ that’s going to trigger a lot of people who are into physics and biology. Is it alive?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/29/dining/raw-water-unfiltered.html
(Score: 5, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Wednesday January 03 2018, @12:19AM (14 children)
I suggest "Dangerous Water"
If they'd like a tagline as well, they could go with:
Dangerous Water
for stupid people
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 03 2018, @12:33AM (4 children)
Our house was built in 1960, on then rural land, with a well supplied from the aquifer ~200' down - limestone and a bit of hydrogen sulfide which usually gasses off pretty well before it gets piped into the house. It's "live water" and we like it that way for bathing and drinking... however, every so often it is time to dose the system with Clorox because the bio-films can get out of hand, both on surfaces you can see, and in the pipes where you can't.
So, if my well water is worth $6/gallon - between the four of us we're getting $250/day value out of that well, over $90K/yr, and we don't even have to drive to a store to get it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03 2018, @01:20AM
And all that sweet sales tax income you're robbing the rest of us of ...
</sarcasm> but someone's probably thinking it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Wednesday January 03 2018, @05:44AM (2 children)
My well is awesome -- no hydrogen sulfide at all. When I'm in town and drink the city water drawn from a local lake, it's just about undrinkable. It has a whiff of lake algea masked by chlorine. Of course, you can cure that just by running city water through one of those pitcher dealies with the charcoal filter in it, but it is very nice to just open the tap and get some ice-cold "live" water right from my well.
(Score: 4, Informative) by hemocyanin on Wednesday January 03 2018, @06:03AM (1 child)
Holy cow -- as much as I like my well, and feel chagrined at not thinking up a way to turn my awesome water into $6/gal gold, there's a whole sack of nutty opportunism going on with this lot:
As a tangent, this is the funniest teardown of a juicero ever: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 03 2018, @05:00PM
It only works in a place where not many people can supply it - around here if you marketed it at one of the local: Whole Foods, Fresh Market, Earth Fare, Trader Joes, or even more esoteric "pure foods" stores, you could sell it for a while at the above price points, but it wouldn't be long before others undercut you. The shmancy crystal sphere container is a nice stab at branding, and you could make various claims about safety testing to try to mask the fact that you're selling well water, but it wouldn't be long at all before a price war started.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday January 03 2018, @12:46AM (7 children)
That's pretty much it. I live off-grid mostly, and that means well water. Still goes through multiple stages of R/O before it goes anywhere in the house.
Unfiltered, untreated, and unsterilized spring water. Stupidest thing I've ever heard, except for the part where people are paying for it. Two six packs and you could afford the R/O, but then would lose all the hipster value I guess.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 03 2018, @01:50AM (6 children)
Sorry, genuinely curious, what's R/O in this context?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday January 03 2018, @01:52AM (4 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 03 2018, @01:56AM (3 children)
Oh, makes sense - around here that's what the limestone does...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03 2018, @10:03AM (2 children)
Such RO water is very hypotonic and useful if you want to have lots of water going in and out your body (e.g. pee a lot). This might be good for recovering from gout, but might not be so good in the long term - maybe not so good for building up bones and if you're unlucky there might also be an imbalance in how your tissues swell and thus aggravate stuff like carpal tunnel syndrome.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday January 03 2018, @04:49PM (1 child)
Huh? What could possibly be unhealthy about RO water, unless the RO system is seriously malfunctioning or contaminated?
Any decent commercial RO system also adds minerals so the water tastes good.
(Score: 4, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 03 2018, @05:02PM
The minerals are key - and again, that's what the limestone does. But without them, "pure" de-ionized water is some pretty nasty stuff, a very strong polar solvent.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday January 05 2018, @08:30PM
Just your standard reverse osmosis, but a larger unit that we change out the filters on more often.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 1) by dw861 on Thursday January 04 2018, @07:05PM
This organic water must really be a thing.
Soon after seeing this Soylent News item, I also stumbled upon Organic Tree Water, in an independent part of my life.
http://www.foodandwine.com/vegetables/tree-water [foodandwine.com]