Do you wash or soak your food with TAP Water?

[Rawspberry]

What do you think of tap water and your food? Obviously if you drink it then there's nothing to consider about using it for everything else. But if you are into drinking bottled water or distilled water or something, what do you use to wash your produce?

And if you don't like to use tap water for your produce, how do you feel that the produce we buy has already been washed and saturated in tap water? I don't like the idea of all the chlorine and other chemicals and fluoride and industrial runoff that gets into the city water where I live. So I drink bottled spring water and use a filter on my shower. However, every-time I go to Whole Foods and think about buying all this produce there I get turned off. Cause I go into the produce section and the whole refrigerator area with all the greens etc. is just dripping in water. Everything is soaked. And usually their sprinklers go off several times when I'm there, saturating the greens with even more city tap water for them to soak up in their little absorbent fragile leaves etc. I feel weird about it. They may be organic but once they soak up all the chemical from the water are they really even "organic" anymore? What do you think and how do you feel about it? I need to eat more greens and get over this. I'm so picky. Thanks! :D

[BrianC]

organic is by no means pure. the soil and water tables produce is grown in is just as contaminated as the tap water they are washed in. yet, you see much less pesticide and fertilizer contamination. the main reason i buy organic is because there is 0 chance it has been irradiated - thus it is guaranteed to be a living food. your body can deal with toxins in moderation, but irradiated food might as well be cooked.

[juliebove]

Here, yes. Other places I've lived, the water was not safe to drink. So I had to buy bottled. I bathed myself in the tap water and I didn't much feel that was safe but I didn't have the money to buy bottled to bathe in! And it wasn't our house so I couldn't really use filters.

As for the stuff that's in tap water, keep in mind that wherever those fruits and vegetables are growing, they are likely to be watered with it as well. So it's in there whether you want it to be or not.

[trinity082482]

organic is by no means pure. the soil and water tables produce is grown in is just as contaminated as the tap water they are washed in. yet, you see much less pesticide and fertilizer contamination. the main reason i buy organic is because there is 0 chance it has been irradiated - thus it is guaranteed to be a living food. your body can deal with toxins in moderation, but irradiated food might as well be cooked.


Unless its home grown :D
I love having a garden in the summer :p

[RawNut]

I do wash my produce in tap water and shake as much of it off as I can. A healthy raw body can cope with the negligible amounts of chemical residue. I wouldn't worry about it since you really can't avoid it unless it's home grown or wild-crafted and unwashed.

Craig

[BrianC]

Negligible, yes. But if you consider the amount of time spent in showers (both absorbing water through skin and inhaling gas) and the use of tap water in cooking, fluoride and chlorine pose serious threats. These are toxic chemicals and should be avoided if possible.

[Nectarine]

I wash my food with bottled water. Have done for years, even before we had a water scare where I live a few years back. The government told people it was okay to drink the water again, and one person died as a result. In addition to flouride and chlorine, pharmaceutical drugs, such as oral contraceptives, are finding their way into recycled city water due to people flushing them down the toilet. Also, when you consider that the water you're using to wash your veges may have been receycled from someone's toilet bowl, that alone should be enough to put you off drinking tap water or using it to wash your food!

[Ariannah]

Our tap water where we live is pretty good, but I don't drink it unless there's no other alternative in my house.

We eat so much fruit and veggies, if I had to BUY bottled water just to rinse grapes and things, and then toss the water out, we'd be broke :D

Most of the things I eat are water-rich and are contained in a skin, so I don't have to rinse much. (Melons, oranges, cucumbers, bananas, etc), and I don't drink much water due to the very high water content of the food itself.

But for water which I drink in any quantity (or use for my non-raw family's cooking) I buy purified water for our water cooler.

For us it's entirely a practical thing, we live with what we can, and make the most of our resources.

[RawNut]

Negligible, yes. But if you consider the amount of time spent in showers (both absorbing water through skin and inhaling gas) and the use of tap water in cooking, fluoride and chlorine pose serious threats. These are toxic chemicals and should be avoided if possible.

True, but, adding to what Rawandnatural said, if we bathed in bottled water, we'd be broke. Luckily, our city water here is not fluoridated so, one less chemical for me to worry about. I just found our water quality table on the Internet :http://www.englewoodwater.com/forms/CCR_2005.pdf
The contaminants don't look too bad but what they DO add, they push to the upper limit of what THEY consider safe.
Maybe we should look into water filtration systems. I'm glad for this thread. I had never looked up our water compositon before.

Craig

[RawNut]

I wash my food with bottled water. Have done for years, even before we had a water scare where I live a few years back. The government told people it was okay to drink the water again, and one person died as a result. In addition to flouride and chlorine, pharmaceutical drugs, such as oral contraceptives, are finding their way into recycled city water due to people flushing them down the toilet. Also, when you consider that the water you're using to wash your veges may have been receycled from someone's toilet bowl, that alone should be enough to put you off drinking tap water or using it to wash your food!

I guess we're lucky here. Reclaimed water is only used for irrigation and BOY can you smell it, but that includes crops. It's surprising that they would let it be used for direct human consumption! Where do you live?

Craig

[Rawspberry]

Ugh, makes me not want to eat at all. Nothing is clean or appetizing. Who knows what they are using on all these farms and what is really in our fruits and vegetables. What they use or what kind of contamination they get on the farm or in transport etc. After that whole Spinach thing, we found out how much waste runoff there is. I have a hard enough time getting over all the live bugs on the greens. I don't want to eat them alive and I don't want to see them die by washing or freezing them off. I pretty much like to stick to greens that are easy to examine like flat leaf stuff. I can't wait to grow my own food. My husband doesn't even wash his food, he thinks I'm phobic.