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: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 03 2018, @01:42AM
C'mon folks, the refills are $14.99 for 2.5 gallons, that's less than $6 per gallon - such a bargain!
I'm all for "natural" "unprocessed" etc. but the one I can't get past is raw milk... too much like Russian Roulette for me. Maybe if it was my cow and I personally oversaw the milking process all the way to the table, but to buy raw milk from a store or farmer's market? I would feel safer buying acid from some guy off the internet who I've never met before.
Now, fishwater: if you could manage to include some fresh fertilized roe in each gallon, I think $7 isn't high enough for proper market placement - probably closer to $9, especially if the hatchlings are looking healthy.
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