Over the past few decades, I’ve noticed something, living in or near immigrant neighborhoods, and it’s that these filteredwater kiosks seem to do a bang-up business there, and not elsewhere. In W. Houston, I can remember seeing lines of Vietnamese people waiting to fill up various jugs with water from them. In Dallas, I saw a bunch of hispanics doing the same thing at the local Fiesta market just this past Saturday.
In both cases, it’s just filtered/treated tap water. Why would this be so popular in certain communities but not others? The local Kroger doesn’t have a big immigrant clientele, and the kiosk/machine doesn’t get nearly the traffic.
Is there just a bigger emphasis on good tasting water in those communities, or is it maybe some kind of old-country hold over distrust of municipal water supplies?
It’s cheaper but less convenient. So it appeals to low-income people whose time is not of high value. Higher income people who are too busy just load cases of Ice Mountain in their car when they do grocery shopping.
Nah, you just have the Hinckley & Schmidt guy come by and drop off a few 5 gallon jugs for the cooler and a few cases of individual bottles, way better than lugging it around yourself.
Y think they are especially popular with immigrant communities because many of them come from locations where the public tap water is not reliably safe to drink. So they are willing to spend (waste) money on this water.
I say ‘waste money’ because this is nothing more than the same tap water that comes out of your faucet at home. It’s ‘filtered’, but how careful do you think the average minimum-wage stockboy is about changing the filter regularly? When I worked for a large grocery chain, I saw some of these filters being changed – they looked like terrible, scummy, dirt-encrusted things – seemed like an absolute petri-dish for growing bacteria. I wouldn’t ever buy that water!
It’s ubiquitous enough that I hadn’t even given it a second thought, I must confess.There is a water cooler in most of those houses, in my experience. We go to one local water store (run by a very old man and his son), and the water does come out of a tap through a pipe … but we buy it anyway. We lug in several 5 gallon containers of water to fill on a regular basis for a cooler. (Plus one of those containers with a spout on it.)
Pre-water cooler era, we dealt with drinking from the old refrigerator water dispenser but from the kitchen sink? Never. Unthinkable. (Boiling it and using it to cook, however, is acceptable and amenable.)We did buy those plastic jugs of water.
Part of it is having a stockpile and being able to see how much water you have and use. The other part is old fashioned paranoia and knowing you should have guaranteed clean, fresh water. There’s piece of mind seeing the machine that filters yourself. If you get sick drinking the tap water from your pipes, it’s your own fault. It doesn’t make sense now that I type it out, but I’m not drinking from the kitchen sink anytime soon.
I often work with immigrant and refugee communities, and this issue is one that we’ve built into some of our projects. In many refugee communities the common wisdom (or rumor) is that you shouldn’t drink tap water. A major reason for this misconception, and why it gets reinforced, is when newcomers see so many native born people here buying bottle water. They are invariable incredulous when we inform them that tap water is not only safe, but it must undergo regular federally mandated testing. (Bottled water does not require this.) We even show them the yearly water quality report that the city sends out. Once they’re convinced, they express great relief that it’s no longer necessary to carry around those huge, five-gallon bottles anymore.
Communications within these communities can become very insular, and people often fall back on faulty notions spread by nothing more than word-of-mouth.
I think that answers the OP quite well. As a followup, what about that bolded part up there? Surely they must do something to the water to get folks to pay for it. What do they, at least, claim to do?
This isn’t just a plain tap from someone’s kitchen sink. It’s a whole big system. That water taps into a water supply somewhere. The pipe runs through at least several filtration stages and a larger boiler contraption to the spout, which you can’t exactly hide. Well, sometimes they have a curtain around it. (There’s decent money in it, once you get several many thousand dollars of start up funds. My mother tried to talk my father into opening one with an uncle, but alas, those talks went over my head.)
Also, it helps to speak the language of the people buying the water. Mostly it’s something like, “I have clean water, you see this?” -points to shiny equipment- Then, depending if you get the old man on a good day or his son on a slow one, an explanation in lay man’s terms about how the system works.
I lived in Sierra Leone, West Africa until I was 10. We would never dream of drinking or even cleaning our teeth with the stuff that came out of the tap. If you opened our fridge, you would have seen a whole shelf of gin bottles - they were full of boiled water (we used them because of the snap lid) and that was for drinking. There was another shelf full of beer, but I was too young for that.
Back in England we went to visit my godparents at the house where I was born, in rural Oxfordshire. They were very proud of the water that had recently been installed and most put out when I asked if it was fit to drink. I simply couldn’t bring myself to drink the stuff straight from a tap.
Are you part of an immigrant/ethnic community? I can’t say that I’ve ever heard a native-born American (white or black) have such distrust of the municipal water system. I mean, people use filters (pitcher, fridge) and bitch about the taste of their water all the time, usually because of weird dirt-like tastes and smells due to the water’s origin in a lake or river, but there’s never been any questions raised as to its safety. That’s why when there is a boil order or some sort of waterborne contamination, it’s national news.
Yes, in fact, I’m part of one of the two specific communities you explicitly mention in the OP. (Albeit, swapped on the location front.) FWIW, I haven’t met every single household, but that’s that.
In most third world countries, the tap water in decent sized towns is treated and safe to drink from the standpoint of pathogen vectors. But people who can afford it prefer to buy bottled water for drinking anyway, for various reasons. Their family might have gotten into the habit when tapwater was not safe. In many places, the water contains heavy metals, which won’t do any harm to a tourist traveling through, but will build up to toxic levels during the course of a decade or a lifetime. There can also be other chemical pollutants present, that are not mitigated by the efforts to eliminate bacteria.
In Hong Kong, everyone boils their drinking water as a cultural ritual, even though it is well-treated and safe to drink in terms of pathogens. But the very old lead pipes in Hong Kong plumbing releases lead into the water. Of course, boiling does not eliminate the lead, and in fact increases its concentration, but they boil their water anyway.
I’ve been to almost a hundred second and third world countries, and in most of them, I drink water that comes from taps unless it is a very small rural community, or is situated in a place where there is high risk water, such as frequent standing water from flooding. I have only gotten sick a couple of times, and there is no certainty that it was from the water, since there are many other ways to be exposed to pathogens in the third world.
Even the cheapest of third world hotels provides a pitcher of drinking water to guests – where they get it is anybody’s guess. So actually, even though willing to drink tapwater if necessary, backpacking in the third world doesn’t always require it on a daily basis. I’ve even drunk water out of an open barrel at a road-house in the Sahara, sharing a ladle with everyone else, with no ill effects.
But didn’t the water from the refrigerator dispenser come from the same pipes as the kithen sink? My plumbing could be strange, but there’s only one pipe where water comes into the house.
But as far as the OP goes, it could actually be about the taste of the water. My family lives in NYC, and years ago, the neighborhood that many of them lived in was not served by the NYC municipal supply. They got their tap water from a private company that used well water and didn’t like the taste. Whenever they visited relatives who had NYC tap water, they would bring 5 gallon jugs to fill and bring home for cooking and drinking.
My aunt and uncle in FL, who are not immigrants, cook and drink only bottled water form the supermarket. Apparently their local tap water quality is not fabulous. My aunt even yelled at me once when I was staying at her house and boiled tap water to make pasta.
I can’t for the life of me figure out why they don’t just install a water filter on their kitchen faucet rather than schlep jugs from the supermarket all the time.
I am among those who haul water home and I will tell you why. About 3 years ago I had to rush a male friend to the hospital to be treated for a kidney stone. It was an hour and a half drive from the deeply rural area we live in. He was obviously in terrible pain well beyond his tolerance level throughout the trip. The experience made quite an impression on me. I later investigated the water we were drinking. I live in southern California in a high-desert region. All water in the area is drawn from private wells. I was using a good quality filter for drinking water. However, a dissolved mineral content test showed the level in both filtered and unfiltered water was 470 parts per million (PPM). The test device instructions informed me that the EPA considers 500 PPM to be the maximum safe level. At that point, I felt determined to find better water to drink. The best solution that evolved out of that was to buy distilled water at the grocery store (presently costs $1 per gallon) and mix in good quality, beneficial minerals at the most desirable level. What I found was Concentrace Ionic Trace mineral drops. That is added to bring the PPM level to 100 - 110. The PPM level could be adjusted for taste or personal preference. The water produced has an excellent flavor.
An aditional contributing memory- I grew up in the San Diego area. At some point after I got old enough to leave my parents home, I recall my dad telling me about his passing a kidney stone. Although he had a very high pain tolerance, he passed out while passing a stone. So I have reason to be concerned I may have a genetic predisposition to develop kidney stones.
So, to sum up, yes, I (as a native born US citizen) distrust tap water. So far, at the age of 62, I have not had to pass a stone, and would like to keep it that way.
First, the OP was talking about ‘immigrant neighborhoods’ in cities, not rural high-desert areas. The tap water there is from municipal water systems, which are carefully monitored. Your private well may not be as carefully controlled, but that’s your business.
Second, you seem to be implying (withot actually saying it) that dissolved minerals in drinking water cause kidney stones. Have you got a cite for that? It’s not something that I had heard before.
Third – San Diego is an hour and a half drive to the nearest hospital? What?
Yeah, I may have wondered off-target a bit for the thread. My apologies.
As for high mineral content causing kidney stones, I may be off there too. I just read up on kidney stones in Wikipedia. High mineral content (in the water) is not listed as one of the causes of stones. Thank you for catching that.
That the EPA says that 500 PPM is a maximum safe level for mineral content suggests to me that there is such a thing as too much, but I need to do more research to learn why. But once per year, I have to flush large amounts of white mineral gunk out of my water heater. I still have little inclination to drink the water.
As for distance from the hospital, I grew up in San Diego, but presently live in Boulevard in the far south-eastern part of the county. It is a long drive to Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa where I delivered my friend, at his request. And there is a busy Border-Patrol check-point along the way to slow the trip.
Most of the time the mineral content of water is various carbonates and sulfates, things that aren’t toxic, just annoying when they precipitate on pots and pans, keep soap from lathering, etc…