Posted by Robyn Lee, April 11, 2008 at 12:00 PM
Millions of women and children in Africa have no access to clean drinking water, causing them to walk for miles every day to collect water that is dirty and unsafe to drink. charity: water, a non-profit organization that raises money to fund well-building projects, produced this PSA starring Jennifer Connelley to portray what life in New York City could be like if the taps went dry and there were no clean water. You may never have to carry 40-pound jerry cans of water home from Central Park, but millions of people around the world have to do something like this every day.
Watch the video, after the jump.
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You know you don't actually have to drink eight glasses of water a day, right? (Not from physical cups, at least.) Slate looks into the history of the "drink eight glasses of water a day" myth.
Posted by Robyn Lee, March 24, 2008 at 12:45 PM
Stephen Colbert interviews inventor Dean Kamen (best known for the Segway) to talk about his vapor compression distiller, a machine that takes contaminated water and turn it into pure drinking water without the use of filters or chemicals. Colbert tests the distiller by adding Doritos to the "contaminated water" container.
The technology behind vapor compression distillers isn't necessarily new, but Kamen's invention looks a lot more compact than already existing vapor compression distillers. Since Kamen appears to have just announced his distiller on the Colbert Report last week, there isn't much information available about it yet.
Watch the interview, after the jump.
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Of course not! But "under the right circumstances," hot water can freeze faster than cold. "Part of the reason appears to be that hotter water loses mass to evaporation, and because it has less mass, less energy is needed to freeze it." And that is what's known as the Mpemba Effect.
Posted by Adam Kuban, August 2, 2007 at 11:30 AM
New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni wrote a blog post that nicely complements the Old Gray Lady's editorial yesterday on choosing tap over bottled water when dining out. Bruni, who knows a thing or two about eating out, has noticed a slight softening in the bottled-water hard sell but still finds that too often diners are asked "sparkling or flat?"—as if there's no option to order tap.
But I think restaurants shouldn’t try to pressure diners into ordering bottled water by pretending another option doesn’t exist and by trying to make diners feel abashed about having to bring up that less expensive — indeed, free! — option themselves. I definitely think that’s part of restaurants’ strategy, though I trust, or at least hope, it doesn’t work on most diners. It shouldn’t.
And it shouldn’t in part because there’s nothing wrong with tap. That’s the point of the editorial, which you can keep on hand, should you ever need your faith in your decision to bypass bottled water bolstered. By asking for tap, you’re not denying yourself a vastly higher grade of product and wading into an inferior pool. You’re doing something sensible and saving yourself a lot of money.
As the editorial points out, drinking eight glasses of bottled water a day would cost about $1,400 annually while the same amount of tap water would cost 49¢.
Related: Tap Water Is All the Rage, The New House Specialty: Tap Water
Posted by Erin Zimmer, July 23, 2007 at 4:25 PM
Alice Waters and her Chez Panisse family aren't the only ones ditching fancy bubbly and spring waters to join the pro-faucet movement. As we reported earlier this year, progressive Bay Area restaurants are risking serious cash flow to help cut the overproduction of plastic bottles and the destructive effects it has on municipal garbage operations. Despite many assumptions that tap water is grimy and laced with fatal chemicals, more and more city officials have reported that municipal water supplies are just as good (and safe) as the fancy bottled stuff, if not better. Sorry, Evian.
Yesterday's Chicago Tribune had a great, well-researched report by national correspondent Stevenson Swanson about the issue, highlighting the work of West Coast mayors Gavin Newsom of San Francisco and Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, who have "issued executive orders prohibiting the use of city money to buy bottled water." New York City restaurants like Del Posto (the joint venture between Mario Batali and Joe Bastianich) are following their West Coast lead.
The restaurant is installing about $20,000 in equipment that will turn New York tap water into still and carbonated mineral water. In the process, the restaurant will be sacrificing the hefty profits that come from selling a $2 bottle of water for $6 or $8.
Speaking of money, how much can we, as recovering bottled-water snobs, save? About "$1,400 yearly," according to a New York Times report last week. That's a whole lotta cash. Think of all the juicy burgers we could buy.
Photograph from iStockPhoto.com
About the author: Erin Zimmer, Serious Eats's Washington, D.C., correspondent, is a just-graduated Georgetown gal following her nose about town as Washingtonian magazine's Dining intern and Best Bites blogger. She got her start as the Hoya campus paper's food columnist, and since entering "real person-hood" has ached for her dining hall's omelet station.
Posted by Adam Kuban, July 10, 2007 at 11:45 AM
Small sensors "the size of a fly's wing" could help farmers save on irrigation costs and reduce impact on the water supply:
Clipped permanently to a leaf during the growing season, the sensor would monitor moisture content and chemical signatures that can indicate when the plant is undergoing water stress. The chemical signs, such as an increase in salt and sugar content in the cells, occur much earlier than physical signs, such as drooping leaves, that many farmers rely on now.
Posted by Adam Kuban, July 9, 2007 at 10:45 AM
How do you see this glass? If you're Martin Lagod, managing director and co-founder of Firelake Capital Management, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, it's half empty and the tap you wanna top it off with is running dry:
According to data collected from NASA and the World Health Organization, 4 billion people will face water shortages by 2050. Already in China, water levels in the Yellow River -- a source that supplies more than 150 million people -- are down 33 percent from the average. In China's cities, wastewater pollution and inadequate treatment facilities have contaminated the water consumed by more than half the population. Of its 669 major cities, 440 face moderate to severe water shortages. The Chinese government—desperately seeking solutions—calls the water shortage a social, environmental and economic crisis.
And it's not just China, Lagod says.
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Posted by Lia Bulaong, April 17, 2007 at 5:24 PM
I've always been somewhat dehydrated, which probably has something to do with my not liking the taste of water and therefore not drinking very much of it. Anyway, it turns out my mom (and probably yours) has been wrong all this time—not only do we not need to drink those eight glasses of water a day, but many people can meet the bare-minimum needs without having anything to drink during the day.
Also news to me: people who drink caffeine regularly, like coffee and sodas, become accustomed to it and don't lose fluid; a glass of Coke can provide the same amount of hydrating fluid as the equivalent amount of water! I'm still going to try to drink more water than I've historically done, but it's good to know I've not been completely parching myself all this time.
Photograph from Kid A* on Flickr
Posted by Lia Bulaong, March 21, 2007 at 12:21 PM
The SF Chronicle's Carol Ness reports on one of the area's newest trends: "At a small but growing number of sustainably inclined Bay Area restaurants, bottled water has become as much of an outcast as farmed salmon and out-of-season tomatoes. Instead of bottled water, diners now are served free carafes of -- gasp! -- tap water. It's filtered and comes still or sparkling, fizzed up by a soda-fountain-style carbonating machine."
Incanto's been serving tap for years but Chez Panisse used to go through 24,000 bottles of Italian water, an ironic choice for a pioneer of sustainability to make. They investigated using locally made sparkling waters but found them too carbonated to go with their food; eventually they purchased a $400 carbonator. The size of a toaster, it was "delivered last week, and installation involved little more than hooking into the reverse-osmosis charcoal filtering system already in use, and running a plastic line from the carbonator to a tap at the bar."
Posted by Lia Bulaong, March 5, 2007 at 8:44 AM
Are those washes for fruit and vegetables worth your money? Alina Tugend of the New York Times thinks not, after talking with University of Maine food science professor Alfred A. Bushway, who found in a study that the washes were no more effective at cleaning fruit than using distilled water—he says you can go ahead and use tap water. If that still makes you a little antsy but you don't want to spring for the washes, you can just use "a mixture of lemon juice and water."
[via Apartment Therapy: The Kitchen]
Posted by Lia Bulaong, February 28, 2007 at 9:43 AM
"For the third time in four years, the town of Montpelier, Ohio, can claim bragging rights to the world's tastiest tap water. Bosnian waters also performed well, winning four of the five top spots for sparkling water." Who knew?
