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, @01:50AM (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.