Living water, live water

How do you like your water?  How about live? A California company is marketing incredibly expensive "live water."  This $70 per gallon water comes from a spring and hasn't been 'killed' by removing the minerals or bacteria in it, one must trust that there are only beneficial bacteria in it.  The science on the site makes my eyes cross, and the Washington Post's Lindsey Bever does a excellent job of sorting through some of the issues. (Full disclosure, I'm quoted in the article.)

But what I found truly stunning was the comment at the end by a high profile Silicon Valley guy about drinking this kind of water, “The pundits will say water is H2O, but I think as you break it down, there's a lot more to it. And I feel very vibrant on its consumption.”

In his encyclical Laudato Si', Pope Francis devotes an entire section to water, noting how the lack of clean drinking water particularly affects the poor, resulting every day in many deaths and about the commodification of this precious liquid.[29-30]  WHO data shows more than a thousand children under the age of 5 die each day from illness caused by drinking water contaminated with microorganisms. Every day, a thousand little ones, a half million children a year. I doubt their parents are feeling "very vibrant" on the consumption of water that hasn't been treated.  Or that the people still lacking water in Puerto Rico are very happy either.

You want to buy incredibly expensive water, 7000 times as expensive as water from the tap, with a wacky pseudoscientific backstory, fine. But to somehow imply that clean water isn't desirable seems to disparage the very real needs of millions of people in the world for water they can drink, for living water.