The Celebrity of Coconut Water

The way I drink coconut water these days is typically American; that is to say, I buy shelf-stable boxes of it at the local health food store. The label is snazzy and conjures up images idyllic white beaches. That's how you do it, right? You go to Hawaii, someone whacks a coconut open for you and sticks a straw in for you to drink. If they want to be tipped extra they'll put in a little umbrella for you.

Philippines has coconuts, too. It's not Hawaii, but they're similar in many ways. When I was a child in the Philippines, we'd get coconut water by hailing one of the vendors on the street who had probably knocked their wares off the palms just that morning. If we were at the beach, we would knock the coconuts down ourselves, and whack them open. Their water didn't taste quite like the water that comes in the boxes. This was the real thing. On a hot day in the Philippines (all the time), many of the benefits of coconut water (as touted by the companies that sell them by the box) are readily apparent. I didn't know anything about electrolytes when I was a kid, but I do remember that nothing took away the hot and the thirst better than coconut water. Not even water. Especially not water, which tended to be nasty if it came from a tap.

Water from a tap is disgusting in America, too. This nation has an obsession with water that stems from a lack of clean sources. Filters aren't good enough, plastic bottles are toxic, so what are we supposed to drink? Someone answered, "coconut water" and that's how we got shelf-stable boxes of them in health food stores nationwide. People are afraid to take a round, hard object and whack it with a cleaver - go figure. But they think, well, if it came from a coconut, it must be clean. Water that has been naturally filtered for years by coconut fibers - what could be cleaner?

I didn't know anything about filters either when I was a kid, but I did know that there was something very provincial about whacking open a coconut and drinking the water straight out of the husk. We weren't thinking of cleanliness at all, but who cares, we got the darn thing for 5 pesos (little more than an American dime) and we were going to drink it. In America, people buy coconut water for $5 a box. It's the best new sports drink - fat-free, low in sugar and carbs, high in potassium. If you're drinking coconut water, you're doing it because you love your body and only want the best for it, so here's $5. Thinking of where I came from, it's funny to realize that I've bought into this mentality. It's less funny to realize that something that should be so cheap and natural costs $5 a pop. It makes me miss the days when people thought you were a country bumpkin if you drank from a coconut. It's not some new sports drink for the health-trend-conscious; it's old, very old, and it used to belong to everybody.

I could, I guess, just get over my fear of large blades and buy an actual coconut to whack open. It's cheaper than buying the box. I'd recommend that for anyone who is fairly confident that they're not going to lose their fingers in the process, because despite the cost, coconut water is somehow worth it.