Two and a half gallons of “raw water” will cost you $36.99 at the Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco, California. At Liquid Eden in San Diego, you can pay $2.50 a gallon for water free of chlorine and fluoride; the shop’s owner told The New York Times that she sells 900 gallons of water a day. Raw water is being championed by the former CEO of Juicero, the notorious Silicon Valley purveyor of juice-squeezing machines that shut down after it was revealed that its bags of juice could be squeezed just as well by hand. Raw water acolytes can also purchase Source, a roof system that collects water from the air, for $4,500. “The water from the tap just doesn’t taste quite as refreshing,” Source investor Skip Battle explained to the Times. “Now is that because I saw it come off the roof, and anything from the roof feels special? Maybe.”

Raw water may well be special, but it is not safe, as the Times concedes. Parasites thrive in unfiltered water. So do bacteria that cause deadly waterborne diseases like cholera. In September, The Guardian reported that a predominately African American region of Alabama is suffering from an outbreak of hookworm, a disease supposedly eradicated decades ago, thanks to contaminated water. When people drink untreated water, it’s usually because they have nothing else to drink.



The raw water phenomenon is related to a hubris specific to Silicon Valley. The industry’s “invention” of things that already exist is, as Abby Ohlheiser noted for The Washington Post last year, “a running theme.” In the case of raw water, however, there’s an extra dimension to the story. People who believe that unfiltered water is good for them haven’t just confused themselves into believing they’ve invented something that already exists. They’ve adopted a hardship that poor people suffer, and stripped it of its association with poverty. In the hands of a would-be juice titan like Doug Evans, raw water is a way of gentrifying that poverty.

From #vanlife to tiny houses to raw water, primitivity is in vogue. Sometimes the trends reflect actual precarity—living in a van has some appeal when you can’t afford rent, let alone a mortgage. But in practice, they are generally only available to the independently comfortable.



Consider the tiny house, which has been sold as a means to downsize one’s life. The homes seem like they should be inexpensive, and compared to, say, a condo in New York City, they are. But that doesn’t mean they’re affordable. On its website, Rocky Mountain Tiny Houses estimates the average cost of one of its homes to be $37,000, and says it’s built homes as expensive as $100,000. Cost varies further depending on the price of land where the home is to be built, and the homes have limited resale value.