I mean you couldn’t drink rain water but it’s safe to drink coconut water, how does the fruit filter the water?
In: Biology
You totally *can* drink the rainwater. It’s one of cleaner sources of water out there, unless you collect it next to a paper mill, chemical plant or a smoggy capital. Of course, it can’t trump actually disinfecting water via chemicals or boiling, but usually – especially in nature, it’s fine enough and chances of getting sick are very low. That’s when you’re drinking it right away as it rains, of course, not having a container full of flies and whatnot collecting it over days or weeks.
Fruits do not take their water from rain directly, but from capillary action in the roots and branches of the plant or tree, which comes from the ground, so it gets filtered fairly well. If ground is polluted badly enough to make fruit unsafe, there’d be more likely no fruit growing there, anyway; fruit are not meant for eating^1, but for plants to reproduce. If fruit’s bad, there’s no reproduction. Also, inside fruit or coconut, airborne contaminants can’t really get to the water as easily as rain clouds.
^1 – “eating” (or endozoochory) actually can be a part of plant’s “strategy” to spread. Most berry plants use this. Animals and birds eat the fruit, then poop seeds elsewhere – along with natural “fertilizer”. That makes the plant or tree mobile and spread in new places. Other plants spread by bees and bugs or seeds that either pop or fly, and coconuts, for example, spread by nuts falling into ocean and travelling elsewhere.
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