WATER

Most of us spend a lot of energy thinking about what we eat. We read labels, seek out organic, debate seed oils and ultra-processing. Then we drink whatever comes out of the tap without a second thought.

Water is the most consumed thing in your diet. It carries minerals into your body and, depending on its source and treatment, a lot of other things besides. It has a history — a catchment, a pipe network, a treatment plant, or a tank on a roof — and that history matters.

This is where I'm collecting everything I've found out about water in New Zealand. Where it comes from, what's in it, how to make the most of what you have, and the researchers who've made me think about it differently. It's an ongoing inquiry. There are gaps. If you know something I don't, I'd like to hear it.

WHERE DOES MY WATER COME FROM?

New Zealand gets its water from four main places: surface catchments (rivers, lakes, and streams), groundwater aquifers, roof-collected rainwater, and the small but real number of people drawing directly from springs or bores.

Most city and town dwellers are on a municipal supply, which means treated surface water or groundwater delivered through a network of pipes. What that water looked like before treatment — and what treatment involves — varies significantly by location. Auckland draws partly from pristine bush catchments in the Waitākere and Hunua ranges, and partly from the Waikato River. Those are very different source waters requiring very different approaches.

Rural New Zealand tells a different story. Roof tanks are common, which means your water quality is tied to what's on your roof, how clean your gutters are, and how long the water has been sitting. Bore water can be excellent — some of the best drinking water in the country comes from deep aquifers — but it can also carry elevated nitrates, arsenic, or bacteria depending on local geology and land use.

"Safe" by New Zealand Drinking Water Standards means it meets a regulated threshold. That's a meaningful guarantee against acute health risk. It doesn't mean zero contaminants, and it doesn't account for cumulative long-term exposure to low-level chemicals. Understanding what's actually in your water, and where it came from, is a reasonable starting point.

OPTIMISING WHAT YOU HAVE

Tap water

The two most common additions to municipal water are chlorine (used to kill pathogens) and fluoride (added for dental health in most urban supplies). Both are present at levels considered safe by health authorities. Both are also worth knowing about if you're thinking about your total chemical load over a lifetime.

A carbon block filter removes chlorine effectively and improves taste. It won't remove fluoride — for that you need a reverse osmosis system or a specific fluoride-reduction filter. RO is thorough but strips minerals too, so remineralisation (adding a mineral stone or drops back into the filtered water) is worth considering if it's your primary drinking water.

Glass or stainless steel storage makes a difference. Water sitting in plastic, especially in heat, picks up compounds you don't want. It's an easy swap.

Tank water

If you're on tank, your first priority is the physical setup: clean gutters, a first-flush diverter (which discards the initial runoff from a roof before it enters the tank), and a good inlet screen. After that, UV treatment or a fine filter addresses biological contamination. Test your water periodically — especially if you're in an area with significant bird activity or near any kind of industrial or agricultural runoff.

Bore water

Get it tested before relying on it for drinking. Most bore water in New Zealand is fine. Some isn't. The cost of a test is negligible against the cost of not knowing.

WATER AROUND NEW ZEALAND

Every city in New Zealand has a different relationship with water — a different source, different infrastructure, different pressures. These are the stories I've been working through, city by city.

Auckland

Auckland draws from bush catchments in the Waitākere and Hunua ranges — and about 15 percent from the Waikato River, 400 kilometres downstream from dairy farms, geothermal country, and small towns. What that means for what comes out of your tap is more complicated than the council's communications suggest.

→ What's Actually In Auckland's Tap Water

Hamilton

Coming soon — Hamilton draws almost entirely from the Waikato River, making it one of the most river-dependent supplies in the country. The treatment story here is significant.

Tauranga

Coming soon — one of New Zealand's fastest-growing cities, Tauranga has been investing heavily in new water infrastructure. The Waiari water treatment plant is part of that story.

Wellington

Coming soon — Wellington sits on a mix of surface catchments and the Hutt Valley aquifer. Its infrastructure is aging, and the gap between source and tap is wider than most residents realise.

Christchurch

Coming soon — Christchurch has historically had some of the best tap water in New Zealand, drawn from a deep aquifer system under the Canterbury Plains. That story is changing.

Dunedin

Coming soon — Dunedin's water comes from southern catchments in the hills above the city. A smaller, quieter story — but one worth telling.

ON THE WATER POSTS

Here's what I've published so far on water. More is coming as I work through the city guides and dig deeper into treatment, contaminants, and the infrastructure behind the tap.

• What's Actually In Auckland's Tap Water
• The Lifetime Fluoride Dose Nobody Thinks About
• Water Solutions
• Water Basics
• Fluoride in Drinking Water: What It Does, How It Works, and Who Decides

PEOPLE THINKING DIFFERENTLY ABOUT WATER

The science of water is more open than most people assume. There's the established chemistry of treatment and contamination — well-documented, well-regulated. And then there's a looser territory of researchers, artists, and thinkers who've asked whether water is more than a carrier of minerals and pathogens. Whether structure matters. Whether intention matters. Whether we've been too quick to reduce it to a simple molecule.

What fascinates me is how differently people can perceive the same thing. Water looked at through a microscope, water imagined as a living system, water treated as a witness to human intention — these are genuinely different ways of seeing, and they produce genuinely different questions. That's what this section is really about. Not a verdict on who's right. The people here, and others like them, make me think. Make me question. That questioning is the root of what Organic Food Together is trying to do.

I've tried to be honest about where each of these thinkers sits on the science spectrum. Some of this is peer-reviewed work at the edge of the accepted consensus. Some of it is harder to categorise. All of it changed how I look at a glass of water.

Gerald Pollack — the fourth phase of water

Gerald Pollack is a bioengineering professor at the University of Washington. His research into what he calls exclusion zone water — a fourth phase of water, beyond solid, liquid, and gas, that forms at interfaces with biological surfaces — is the most scientifically grounded work on this list. It has implications for how water behaves inside living cells, and potentially for how we think about hydration itself.

His book The Fourth Phase of Water (2013) is the accessible entry point. His academic work is published and peer-reviewed, though it remains contested in parts of the mainstream scientific community.

→ Gerald Pollack — more background, videos, and links to his work (coming soon)

Viktor Schauberger — living water

Viktor Schauberger was an Austrian forester and inventor who spent decades observing how water moves in nature — spiralling, cooling, gaining energy as it descends through mountain streams. He developed theories about the relationship between water movement and vitality that were out of step with the physics of his time and remain outside the mainstream. He was also, by most accounts, a genuinely original thinker who noticed things others walked past.

His ideas have influenced natural building, water vortex devices, and the broader "living water" movement. Whether the underlying physics holds up is a different question from whether his observations were careful and worth considering.

→ Viktor Schauberger — more background, videos, and links to his work (coming soon)

Masaru Emoto — water and intention

Masaru Emoto was a Japanese researcher who, from the 1990s until his death in 2014, conducted experiments photographing water crystals formed under different conditions — exposed to different music, words, or intentions. The photographs are striking. The methodology has been widely criticised by scientists for lacking controls and reproducibility.

What Emoto was pointing at — that water might respond in some way to its environment — has been taken up by researchers with more rigorous approaches. Whether his specific claims hold up is genuinely contested. His work remains one of the most influential popular introductions to the idea that water is more than a passive carrier.

→ Masaru Emoto — more background, videos, and links to his work (coming soon)

Veda Austin — water as witness

Veda Austin is a New Zealand researcher and artist who photographs what she calls the "creative intelligence" of water — studying the crystalline structures that form in partially frozen water, often in response to words, images, or intentions placed beneath the sample. Her work is methodologically different from Emoto's and she is careful to frame it as observation and art as much as science.

She is worth knowing about partly because of the quality of her images and the questions they raise, and partly because she is doing this work from New Zealand. The conversation about water isn't just happening elsewhere.

→ Veda Austin — more background, videos, and links to her work (coming soon)

WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT WATER?

This is very much a work in progress. I haven't tested every municipal supply. I haven't visited every catchment. There are people all over New Zealand who know things about their local water — their bore, their tank, their town supply — that aren't written down anywhere.

If you've got something to add, a local detail I've missed, or a researcher or resource worth looking at, I'd genuinely like to hear it. Use the contact page or leave a comment on any of the posts.