Between being diagnosed with heavy metal poisoning (from eating fish) to reading my town's scary stats on our polluted water supply, I've felt like the universe has been trying to send me one big, horrific message. Basically that our food and water supply is not nearly as clean as we might think, and it might, in fact, be making us sick. (It actually makes me ill just thinking about it!)
But I still had to laugh when I read about Molecule, aka the Water Cafe, which recently opened in Manhattan. For $2.50 you can buy NYC tap water, supposedly filtered down to its purest form (supposedly complete with healing properties!) with a custom-made device worth more than $20,000. You can either drink it in the cafe or take home gallons of it. Sounds insane -- like something out of a Hunger Games dystopia. Has it really come to this?!
Sadly, yeah. Finding water in its purest form is really damn hard these days. So much of our supply is tainted with endocrine-disrupting fluoride, viruses, bacteria, lead, etc. If you look at the facts, it's gut-wrenching. It's enough to make someone like me (who has always abhorred the idea of buying bottled water) think something like this Water Cafe is pretty smart.
At the very least, it's got to be a sign of the future. There's no way a business like this -- or even bottled water in bulk in grocery stores, which would have been laughed at even 30-40 years ago -- would have come to fruition if there wasn't a market for it. And there's only a market for it because we've gone and made such a mess of our water supply that we may soon need to rely exclusively on bottled water and water cafes like this for water that's not toxic. Ugh.
Guess we can only hope that the more prevalent something like this becomes, the more freaked out we get. And the more freaked out we get, the more serious action we'll take to prevent all of our drinking water from costing us a pretty penny.
Does the existence of something like this water cafe freak you out or do you think it's totally unnecessary and ridiculous?
Image via Jenn Durfey/Flickr
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Comments 6
Drinking water is also heavily contaminated with hormones - the top cause of breast cancer (80% of BC is estrogen linked).
There are machines that convert humidity to pure drinking water - and the water tastes very good. (We bought one but now we live in Kansas and experienceing the worst drought in 50 years. There is not enough humidity to produce water i.e.15 %)
i still wouldn't buy bottled... its not regulated and is usually just tap water or at best tap water filtered with something akin to a brita filter... thankfully my mother bought my family, as a gift, an amazing filter that even takes out flouride... its huge, but i think worth it... filter your own water and use your own reusable bottles.. no need to spend needlessly and add to polution with all that plastic...