Respect Your Mother

Restaurants start shutting off tap to bottled water

By Shirley Dang, MEDIANEWS STAFF

Article Last Updated: 04/04/2007 11:06:06 AM PDT

IN creating Incanto restaurant and wine bar, owner Mark Pastore painstakingly rendered his vision of fine Italian dining.

Florentine sheet music, inked onto parchment from the 16th century, hangs from the archways. Super-Tuscan vintages that cost $275 a bottle line the wooden racks of his climate-controlled cellar. Diners can feast on porchetta di testa, or pork head, with shaved radish and pecorino.

What Pastore does not offer: a single drop of San Pellegrino, Santa Lucia or any other bottled water, regardless of provenance.

When it opened in 2002, the San Francisco restaurant became the first in the country to consciously ban packaged water for conservation reasons.

Pastore said the decision sprang from his belief in gustatory authenticity that happens to go hand-in-hand with environmental stewardship.

"I just think it's the right thing to do," said Pastore. "I thought it was kind of foolish to put water in bottles and ship it around the world."

This spring, Chez Panisse in Berkeley will join the small cluster of Bay Area restaurants like Incanto, NoPa in San Francisco and Poggio in Sausalito that have completely traded in bottles for tap.

Shipping glass bottles of European spring water across the Atlantic to American restaurants pollutes the air and oceans, environmentalists say.

And domestic water in plastic bottles, the kind most purchased by the average American, may pose an even greater environmental threat: landfill ...

ElectroSensitivity

Sometimes in the past called Electrical Oversensitivity and today sometimes Electrical Hypersensitivity (EHS), it is a fairly new phenomenon, the first cases and discussions came to public knowledge in the early seventies in the 'west'. The old USSR and satellite states were much quicker off the mark and saw weapons potential in so-called 'radiowave sickness'. They even bombarded the Moscow American Embassy with invisible rays during the cold war, some of the statistics of ilnesses therein are now publicly available. It became recognised as a source of concern in Sweden where FEB, their Association for the Electrosensitive, started in 1987.
EMFs

At its simplest, electrical sensitivity or electrical hypersensitivity is a chronic illness triggered by exposure to electromagnetic fields (EMFs). They in turn are fields/waves of energy emitted by all electrical sources including power lines, electric home and office appliances (VDUs, computers, TVs,) motors, wall wiring, electrical substations, transformers and radio/radar/microwave transmitters such as mobile phones and masts. A minority of the population are believed to be affected by electromagnetic radiation (EMR) between 3% and 7% in one survey, 13.5% in another and yet other estimates range up to 35% of the population showing some indications of electro-stress.None of this should be surprising as we are perhaps the most exqusitely sensitive electronic equipment on the planet, while we are alive that is, with death our own personal brain and nervous system electrical circuitry ceases functioning. It is now how we define death, 'brain function has ceased', that is there is no more electrical activity detectable. Outside electrical currents easily interfere with our interior ones, they interrupt our own signalling processes just like interference on your TV or radio receiver.

Its that simple, logical and undeniable. But big companies hire clever scientists and even doctors, especially psychiatrists to confuse the media and all of us in order to safeguard their vast profits, they stack commitees, withold grants from universities and pay relatively small sums out of vast profits to protect themselves at our expense. This is the nature of politics and power in this twenty-first century, no different from the Medici of old Florence or the robber-barons of the railroads of the early USA. Massive fortunes wrestle to defeat opponents while little people get hurt and crushed. Only a fair society, democratic government and truthful science and medicine will protect us, like our freedom to organise this charity for our own defence. Read more

[Source:ElectroSensitivity-UK]