Come with me if you want to live

[morgana]

one year when we had a big ice storm. Our power was out for seven days. The town itself was out for three. The locally owned stores were price gouging terribly. -snip- So yeah. Maybe individuals were being neighborly, but certainly not those local businesses. Which are all gone now, btw.

Woah, flashback! 9/11, Topeka Kansas, big run on gasoline because of everybody panicking. So most of the stations do put their prices up by a dime or so a gallon.

Except one owner on the south edge of the city, who TRIPLED his prices. Some people yelled, some people paid, some people yelled and then paid . . . Then somebody called the cops who came out and had a chat with him. And called the company that held the label on his franchise. Gee, suddenly his prices were only about twenty-five cents a gallon more than before the towers fell.

Funny thing, though. The station burned down three days later, while he was out of town having a not very comfortable chat with a bigwig from his company. Cops never did figure out how it started . . .

Topeka's an interesting city.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

Her reaction: "You can drink the tapwater here?" As though it was an alien concept. I explained that you can do more than just drink it; eighteen breweries and counting have come to town specifically to use it. Apparently we have some of the best water in the country. She was duly impressed and noted that where she was from, the water tastes like sulfer.

That must be awful. Here, the only reason you'd ever need a bottle of water is to have something to refill throughout the day from the sink or the drinking fountain.

In my area, the water tastes a bit off. Can't recall what the city treated it with but there is information on the city's website for kidney dialysis patients, as well as fish and amphibious pet owners.

I'll just keep buying the bottled water by the cases . . . and I have a weekly ritual of checking the ads in the Sunday paper to see who's got the cheapest price on it for the week.

[Chromatix]

Helsinki has some of the best tap water in the world.

It comes from a huge freshwater lake (Päijänne, which stretches from Lahti to Jyväskylä) via a 100km tunnel blasted through solid granite. It is then purified in an underground plant, using a process well-suited for water that's already pretty clean.

When that plant was under maintenance for several months, the water supply came from a different direction. There was a noticeable change in taste.

[EricKei]

Lots of people in the mountain communities around here have generators.

I grew up in New Orleans, where people buy perishables (and water) when a disaster is incoming despite the fact that almost nobody owns generators. Plenty of people try to "rent" one from the Mart of Wal (meaning, buy one, use it, and try to return it even though it's been used and is therefore unsellable), but that's true in many places.

As for the water -- we got ours from the Big Muddy -- the Mississippi River. We just had incredibly good filtration systems. That being said, anyone who could scrape the money to do so uses Kentwood/Abita Springs water delivery for their drinking water, and buys the stuff in 5-gallon jugs. Their product comes from springs up in the more rural areas near Boglausa.

[Shalom]

I grew up in Brooklyn. We got our water from upstate New York via a set of tunnels. As far as I know, it's totally unfiltered (this leads to some questions as to whether the water is kosher, as it supposedly has copepods in it). The taste changed sometime in the 80s when as an "emergency" measure that's since become permanent, they started mixing in 10% Hudson River water (from up near Poughkeepsie, where it's allegedly cleaner than near the city) and had to increase the chlorination, but it's still better than the water anywhere else, at least if that's what you grew up drinking.

My boss, when I worked in Manhattan, moved from there to New Rochelle. He got into the habit of filling a gallon of water from the slop sink at the back of the shop and bringing it home with him.

Then I moved to Buffalo. Started drinking bottled water then. Distilled, by preference: I had it in the house to fill the iron, had nothing else to drink and found that the lack of taste was most reminiscent of what I'd been used to in New York.

[WishfulSpirit]

(this leads to some questions as to whether the water is kosher, as it supposedly has copepods in it).

Don't most rabbis hold that a bug has to be visible with the naked eye to count, as microscopes weren't invented during Moses' time?

Anyway...the water in New York is so good for pizza that I've heard of at least one pizza shop owner in LA having a chemist chemically recreate Brooklyn water to use in their dough.

[dalesys]

... a chemist chemically recreate Brooklyn water ...

EEE EEE EEE! In-Organic Artifice-ial Water!

[Shalom]

Don't most rabbis hold that a bug has to be visible with the naked eye to count, as microscopes weren't invented during Moses' time?

Pretty much, yeah. The argument is, some of them are large enough to see with the naked eye if you look really closely. I'm strictly kosher myself, and I don't worry about them, but some folks were running their water through a cloth for a while (as if that would help, I'd think they're small enough to get through pores in the cloth).

Vegetables are a bigger problem. It's almost impossible to get kosher brussels sprouts these days, as they're all infested with aphids since the banning of DDT. Or you can pay out the wazoo for frozen, greenhouse-grown, guaranteed bug-free sprouts (like 5-6 dollars a bag). Funny, brussels sprouts are the one vegetable stereotypically hated by children, but I always liked 'em. Asparagus are almost as bad; at least you can cut the tips off (that's where they live) and eat the stalks, or soak them in soapy water first to chase them off. It makes me wonder how many people, who aren't Jewish and don't need to worry about kashrus, know that they're eating bugs with their veggies?

[WishfulSpirit]

It makes me wonder how many people, who aren't Jewish and don't need to worry about kashrus, know that they're eating bugs with their veggies?

I'm not too concerned about that if I don't actually SEE the bugs. Bugs are a heck of a lot less dangerous to one's health than a lot of the chemical pesticides (not that I can afford to eat only organic either). Then again, I despise both brussels sprouts and asparagus, so I guess I'm safe there.

[Ironclad Alibi]

I'm not too concerned about that if I don't actually SEE the bugs.

I don't know about kosher, but the bugs I can't see are a lot more dangerous than the bugs I can see. Thankfully I was vaccinated as a kid.

[Dreamstalker]

When I was a pup, my grandparents had well water (occasionally you had to let a glass of cold water sit for cloudiness to dissipate). That made the best coffee. Eventually they had to hook up to the town system, and I did notice a difference in taste.

When I lived in Santa Fe I didn't need the news to know we were in a drought--the tapwater would taste like chlorine (safe to drink, but it was probably coming from a silty level in the reservoir so they gave it extra treatment).

For a while here the tap water/ice cubes would smell like fish. It's fine now, but we still have a Brita for drinking/coffeemaker water.

[Food Lady]

If the water isn't carbonated, I don't care how good the sale is. I just about refuse to drink still water. Iced tea is my still water. But even with a good seltzer sale, I'm not going into a fray like that! It's not worth the probably fifth head injury. People are nuts.

[WishfulSpirit]

I don't know about kosher, but the bugs I can't see are a lot more dangerous than the bugs I can see. Thankfully I was vaccinated as a kid.

Fair enough, but we were talking about actually eating insects, not ingesting bacteria or viruses.

[Shalom]

A friend of mine, let's call him Big Z, works as an inspector for one of the kosher certifying agencies. Recently he was working a venue that didn't usually host kosher events, trying to explain to the rather snooty caterer why he required him to decapitate the asparagus. The guy was reluctant, insisting that the tips were the finest part, and that there couldn't possibly be insects infesting them.

Big Z said "Look, I'll show you." He filled a sink with water, dumped in some salt, and swished the bunch of asparagus in it... and the little buggers came swarming off and floated up to the top. The caterer's eyes got completely round and he yells "Holy shit!" End of that argument...

[rapana1]

It's so weird to think of a place where you can't drink water straight from the tap. By preference, my flatmate had a counter-top water filter installed in our kitchen, and that's what I use now to fill the jug, my water bottles, and the chiller jug in the fridge door. But if you hadn't grown up on drinking tank supply on a farm like she had, you'd probably be fine with a glass of town supply water straight from the tap anywhere in the country.