How To Drink Water

A few months ago, I came across a company called Notpla – an oddly-named company that produces experimental, seaweed-derived packaging designed to biodegrade in a few weeks. Their flagship product is the equally oddly-named Ooho!.

If Ooho! looks very similar to a water-filled Tide Pod, that’s because it’s essentially just that. The product is Notpla’s version of bottled water, sans bottle: the entire thing can be eaten, pod and all.

I’m telling you, watching people eat a pod of water is just straight-up weird:

Ooho! is produced and dispensed at the point of sale – which means that if Notpla had their way, the vending machine in your lobby would dispense pods of water instead of the usual bottles and cans. Unfortunately, the company is running into a major snafu – people just find the pod to be, well, odd. Stonyfield tried a similar edible pod idea with their Frozen Yogurt Pearls, but the product was eventually shelved due to customers’ reactions. “It was a great attempt,” Stonyfield CEO Gary Hirshberg told Nat Geo, “but consumers found grabbing an unwrapped product incomprehensible, even though they could wash it.”

See, we’re accustomed to receiving things in a package of some sort. Buying a self-contained blob of fro yo or a pod of water is strange, and possibly unhygienic, and (once you get over the novelty of the pod thing) maybe a little bit boring.

The basic reason that we think pod-water is weird is because we’ve always drank water out of a bottle. Like, always for the entirety of human history. The reason we’re going to stick to water bottles is because that’s how it’s always been done.

And that’s the problem with us, isn’t it. It’s easy to do the thing that’s always been done. Far more difficult is to do the new thing, the different thing, the odd or slightly funny thing (this, by the way, is why you should travel – you get better with practice). The biggest barrier to converting the world to more sustainable patterns isn’t the economy, or the production line, or the politicians. All of those things can fall into line. The biggest barrier is us.

The reality is that there are probably many ways to get a drink of water.

The question is whether we will suspend our laziness, our judgment, and our preference long enough to find out what they are.