Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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ChrisGreaves
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Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

Post by ChrisGreaves »

I am studying my disposal of waste-water. This leads me to study my use of white-water (from the tap) and grey water (between white and black)

Instead of carrying a bottle of tap-water to a meeting or a concert, I could carry a small glass jar or glass bottle of sterilized vegetable water. I am assuming that besides the advantage of NOT running water from the tap, there are other benefits in the nutritional sense; vegetable proteins, natural salts and so on.

Why not carry sterilized vegetable water?
(1) I have to sterilize the water using my bottling/canning procedure (but since my focus is on water-use I am not concerned about electricity use)
(2) I will be carrying a heavy glass vessel in place of a light weight plastic container (I always bring my containers home empty for re-use)
(3) The contents of the bottle might look like stale urine (unsettling to those who are watching)
(4) Need to dispose of the contents within, say, three hours after opening (to forestall decay and bacterial growth)
Other?
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Rudi
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

Post by Rudi »

Sorry me asking and I know it does not contribute to your list, but is there some kind of water shortage in Canada?
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HansV
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

Post by HansV »

I'd say it's more trouble than it's worth. And you *should* be concerned about electricity use as well as water use.

Perhaps your house plants would appreciate vegetable water...
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ChrisGreaves
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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Rudi wrote:Sorry me asking and I know it does not contribute to your list, but is there some kind of water shortage in Canada?
Well.
Yes.
And No.

Remember that I'm from the desert in W.A. and was HORRIFIED to find streams of water cascading down the gutters in 1978 in Paris; turns out it was how (back then) they cleaned the sidewalks - sweep into the gutter and then flush it down the sewer Seine.

Then I got to be in Singapore and learned that it was illegal to leave flowers-in-water on a grave.
Turns out it bred mosquitos.

So then (1982) I landed in Toronto and couldn't believe the hoo-hah over water.
Turns out that for all we are lapped by Lake Ontario, the city has to filter and fluoridate every cup of water that is used to wash cars (drive-through or hose-in-the-driveway), every pan-ful that goes on the lawn (sprinklers), flush down the toilet, and so on.
It sometimes isn't so much about the availability of water as the availability, and cost, or providing drinking water.

My current study arose out of hypothesizing about the impact of an economic blockade of Canada in WWIII; that arose out of discussion of the blockade of Germany arising out of the Third Balkan war.

I thought that if we disconnected our U-traps (under the sinks) and were forced to carry our waste water, instead of carrying our white-water, we'd get a better view of our consumption.

The economic model would be to provide drinking water for free, but to charge by volume for disposal of the waste.
Most municipalities charge for provision but levy no charge for disposal.

I hope that my response doesn't muddy the waters too much. It's an interesting study of one's habits. :cheers:
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ChrisGreaves
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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HansV wrote:I'd say it's more trouble than it's worth. And you *should* be concerned about electricity use as well as water use. Perhaps your house plants would appreciate vegetable water...
I am concerned about energy use(1); but for the purpose of this study I have defined the system to exclude energy use.
House plants is dead easy.
The challenge is to use the white water to the maximum extent before declaring it to be Black water.

When I was a kid there was a farmer's wife near a township called Bodallin, and one day she reeled of thirteen serial uses for water.
The only water supply was from two rain-water tanks (and this is in ten-inch per year rainfall country), and the thirteenth use, I remember, was when the water was carefully poured on to the Geraniums outside the back door. Before the water hit the geraniums she had used it twelve other times. I think that clothes-washing came after bath-water, and that came after boiling vegetables.

(1) I suspect that I am the only resident in my building who uses the stove as a space-heater overnight in preference to the wall heaters so that I can melt down the date-and-water mixture for date slice by placing the pan on the element that sits over the oven exhaust!
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

Post by PJ_in_FL »

What exactly do you mean by the term "vegetable water"?

Is this water that was poured into the flower pot and drained out the bottom, or perhaps water used to wash the vegetables after bringing them home from the market or harvesting from a local source?
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

Post by Rudi »

As usual, a very detailed and informative reply. Very indepth, Chris!

As a point of interest, Cape Town municipality will be imposing stage 1 water restrictions as of Jan 1, 2016. Apparently our dams are lower than previous years at the same stage, so drinking vegetable water might be a possible necessity. <bwagghh>
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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PJ_in_FL wrote:What exactly do you mean by the term "vegetable water"?
-Sorry PJ.

I mean the water in which i have boiled my vegetables.
Typically I would run cold tap-water into a saucepan, add the vegetables, bring to the boil, simmer, then (in my mis-spent youth) drain the water off and let it run down the drain of the kitchen sink.

Nowadays I often save the water and use it for boiling rice later that day.
In winter-time I can use the water (I suppose I could call it "vegetable broth") as part of the base for soups.
Because this study permeates my thinking, (and because I have placed half-coke cans upside down over my taps) my brain is forced to consider alternatives to using tap-water when, in this case, filling my water-bottle.

Rinsing vegetables in tap-water, that water could be saved, (settled for grit) and then used later for boiling vegetables.
Or for brushing teeth.

But today, still, I'm wondering if boiled vegetable water would be a serious alternative to plain tap-water.

(Also trying not to segue into veg-eatables :evilgrin: )
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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Rudi wrote:As a point of interest, Cape Town municipality will be imposing stage 1 water restrictions as of Jan 1, 2016. Apparently our dams are lower than previous years at the same stage, so drinking vegetable water might be a possible necessity. <bwagghh>
Well, I remember those times too; in my case, Mundaring Weir would get horribly low, and there would be a ban on watering lawns all the way from Perth to Kalgoorlie.

Of course, the West Aussies love to gamble, so each winter there were office pools ( :clapping: ) for the date and time when the first black streak of water overflowed the lip of the dam.

Some years no one collected.

I think that the weir has been raised since then. :sad:

overflow1
overflow2
overflow3
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

Post by PJ_in_FL »

ChrisGreaves wrote:Mundaring Weir would get horribly low, and there would be a ban on watering lawns all the way from Perth to Kalgoorlie.
The use of cleaned, sanitized, DRINKING water for watering lawns should be banned WORLD-WIDE! :bash:

It's INSANE to pour large quantities of drinking water onto the ground to keep -- in Florida at least -- non-native plants and grasses alive in a climate they don't live in. :hairout:
PJ in (usually sunny) FL

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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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PJ_in_FL wrote:The use of cleaned, sanitized, DRINKING water for watering lawns should be banned WORLD-WIDE!
:thumbup: agreed
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

Post by PJ_in_FL »

Chris, I'd be wary about reusing water that was used to rinse the vegetables. Unless you've grown them yourself, there may be residual pesticides, fungicides, etc. on the skins. That water has to be assumed "non-potable".

You could perhaps save it for a later flush.

RE: Watering lawns

Yes, I go a little crazy over that topic. I used to live a few counties north of Tampa Bay and had a well for household usage. Although we didn't have the problem while there, several people that used wells for home and farm use within the same county had wells dry up or go brackish (unusable) due to the millions of gallons per day the water (mis-)management district allowed to be pulled out of the aquifers for spraying on lawns, keeping strawberries from freezing, and other useless wastes. As the aquifers are drained, the reduced pressure of fresh water allows back-pressure from the Gulf to force salt water into the aquifers, ruining the water table for personal use. It requires desalination at that point to get usable water. That's why all the towns in Pinellas County and along the coast have to pump water from 2 counties north. They's pumped their aquifers out and now the water there is unusable.

The Strawberry Incident -- a couple of years ago there was a brief cold snap that dropped temperatures in the strawberry-growing centers of Plant City and Lakeland, FL, to below freezing for a few hours overnight. There are many ways to protect the strawberries, but the least costly to the farmers is to just continuously spray the entire fields with water directly pulled from the fresh-water aquifer until the temperature rises. Turns out all this spraying used up over 2 BILLION gallons of water, enough water to fill a cube where each side is 650 feet long! :hairout: :sad:

That was just one of the many times this has occurred. It seems like it's nearly an annual occurrence.

Oh, and about those strawberries the farmers "saved" with all that water: well, the price of strawberries went down so the berries weren't picked and were left to rot in the fields. The farmers wouldn't allow people in to pick the berries themselves due to "liability concerns". <sigh>

Sorry to hijack the thread, but stopping this kind of insanity is probably a better bang for the buck when it comes to water conservation.

And, yes, my yard looks like it's never been watered because it hasn't. Has a nice collection of native "weeds" that I pick and choose what stays and what gets pulled, but they all have to survive on rain alone.
PJ in (usually sunny) FL

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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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PJ_in_FL wrote:...my yard looks like it's never been watered because it hasn't. Has a nice collection of native "weeds" that I pick and choose what stays and what gets pulled, but they all have to survive on rain alone...
I could have scripted this sentence as if it were my own. :laugh:
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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PJ_in_FL wrote:Chris, I'd be wary about reusing water that was used to rinse the vegetables. Unless you've grown them yourself, there may be residual pesticides, fungicides, etc. on the skins. That water has to be assumed "non-potable".
Thanks PJ, and I appreciate your concern about pesticides, but if the vegetables have been rinsed beforehand, then the boiled vegetable water is a second rinsing, a dilution of a dilution, right?

I haven't worried about toxins to date.
I buy carrots in a plastic bag, apples ditto, so that I am sure that shoppers haven't randomly picked their nose and then felt the fruit.
(Also I don't have to peel off those :censored: plastic labels)
I eat an apple or carrot raw, so I ought to be more concerned about that than the vegetable water. Agreed? :scratch:
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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First, perhaps I misunderstood but you stated you were considering using the rinse water as the boiling (vegetable) water. If so, then I'd be very concerned about pesticides and other contaminates!

The pesticides may not be broken down by the boiling process, and in some cases, can actually be rendered more toxic by heat -- ref. PCBs from over-heated transformer cooling oils. Different oils (I'm not doing the Velikovsky thing confusing hydro-carbons with carbohydrates!) but trying to make a point that boiling doesn't render contaminates safe.

The "fresh air" the vegetables were exposed to may have traces of heavy metals if they were close to a highway, which is a source of lead, silver, cadmium, and nitric oxides from auto exhaust and brake shoe dust. This gets deposited on nearby fields that are then harvested, "farm-fresh", to your grocer.
:flee:

Not all doom-and-gloom, just possibilities to consider before reusing that rinse water!
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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PJ_in_FL wrote:First, perhaps I misunderstood but you stated you were considering using the rinse water as the boiling (vegetable) water.
:mea culpa:
I did not state clearly that I was thinking of the water in which I boil my vegetables, rather than the water in which I rinse them.

My overall driving thought here is to measure the waste-water disposal, and from that I swim upstream with many thoughts about how I arrive with such a volume of waste-water, in particular, the source(s) of the waste -water.

Hence the thought 'Why am I straining my boiled-vegetable water down the kitchen sink drain".
I *do* use boiled vegetable water as a stock in soups etc.
But then I drew tap-water to fill; my water-bottle and started wondering if I couldn't use boiled-vegetable water as a nutritious alternative to fresh tap-water (of which I drink enough already!)
The "fresh air" the vegetables were exposed to may have traces of heavy metals if they were close to a highway, ...
Well the good news is that living as I do in the heart of the downtown construction zone (two condos going up on our 100-mere street alone) I am not exposed to highway pollutants; just dump-trucks, Triffid-like mobile cranes each weekend, idiot taxi-drivers and plebs who leave their engines running because they'll be cold when they dash back out of the coffee-shop ... don't get me started.

I appreciate the risk of airborne pollutants on fresh foods, but am of the mind that I probably should be more concerned about my shortcut through the covered parking-lot when it is raining/snowing/-20c etc).

That is, air-borne pollutants on veggies is of less concern to me that breathing in the fumes as I walk up Bay Street to the Public Library.

(signed) "Trying not to be paranoid" of Downtown-Toronto

P.S. Would you be courageous enough to bottle and then drink your boiled vegetable water?
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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ChrisGreaves wrote:P.S. Would you be courageous enough to bottle and then drink your boiled vegetable water?
Getting back to the simple question at the heart of the topic, I'd prefer to use the "vegetable water" in my morning smoothie with the avocado, banana, protein mix, and spinach to mix with the "Silk" soy milk. Have to discuss this with the hausfrau!
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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PJ_in_FL wrote:... I'd prefer to use the "vegetable water" in my morning smoothie ...
Well, OK.
I was thinking "Why not drink the boiled-vegetable water" whereas you are going one step further and using it in a smoothie.
IOW (I think) you agree that it ought to be safe.

And I publicly acknowledge that Eileen's Lounge does NOT advocate safe-or-not; anything I do I do at my own risk.
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

Post by PJ_in_FL »

Safe as long as the veggies are rinsed and, per my previous discussion, the rinse water is discarded as potentially tainted.

The veg water should be perfectly fine, just a little weird to carry around in a plastic water bottle since it probably looks like you're drinking that same bodily fluid a recent leader of India drank first thing in the morning. :barf:
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Re: Vegetable water as drinking fluid?

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PJ_in_FL wrote:...just a little weird to carry around in a plastic water bottle ...
Agreed!
But then again I meet a group with one member who drinks what looks like atomised cat-vomit from a Mason Jar. I suspect it is liquified kale ...
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