An Indian home appliance company recently introduced the idea of ‘vegetarian water’ in an ad campaign, to appeal to their predominantly vegetarian customer-base. It might seem absurd, but they’ve tried hard to make it sound convincing – they claim that their new product, the Prestige LifeStraw water purifier, ‘gives only pure and vegetarian water’.

“Pure vegetarian water? Must be an advertising gimmick!” the newspaper ad declares. And then it goes on to give reasons why it isn’t a gimmick. “Most purifiers claim to kill all viruses, bacteria and germs,” the ad reads. “But the chemically killed microorganisms remain in the water, making it safe, but effectively non-vegetarian.” Consuming dead creatures in your water, they imply, is against the principles of vegetarianism.

So TTK Prestige has the perfect solution – a non-electric gravity based product with advanced Swiss-based multi-stage Ultrafiltration technology. It removes 99.9999 percent bacteria and viruses, and 99.99 percent protozoan cysts, so you get ‘safe, pure vegetarian water’. The Prestige LifeStraw is in line with the company’s portfolio of increasingly innovative products; they’ve created it in partnership with Lifestraw SA, a popular Swiss manufacturer of state-of-the-art water purifiers.

Miraculously, the LifeStraw purifier can filter out microscopic microorganisms, while retaining all the essential minerals in the water, which is apparently what vegetarians want. But I wonder if vegetarians do consider bacteria and other such life forms as a part of the animal kingdom. And what about the millions of bacteria that we already have living inside our bodies? Would vegetarians want to kill and filter them out as well?

The idea of vegetarian water might be unique, but I’m not quite sure vegetarians are going to buy into it. What do you think?

Source: This Week Bangalore

via Neatorama