If you didn’t know California was experiencing a historic drought, driving through the streets of Beverly Hills and Bel Air would only keep you in the dark. Some of the state’s biggest known water guzzlers live here.

Katharine Mieszkowski
Senior Reporter and Producer
Katharine Mieszkowski is a senior reporter and producer for Reveal. She's also been a senior writer for Salon and Fast Company. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Mother Jones, Slate and on NPR's "All Things Considered."
Her coverage has won national awards, including the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award two years in a row, an Online News Association Award, a Webby Award and a Society of Environmental Journalists Award. Mieszkowski has a bachelor's degree from Yale University. She is based in Reveal's Emeryville, California, office.
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How naming and shaming water wasters helps conservation
When water agencies share data on their customers’ usage, and the public learns who the most egregious water wasters are, it generally leads to stronger conservation efforts. But a 1997 law means agencies are under no obligation to release this information.
To shield tech executives, California’s biggest water users are secret
In the midst of a historic drought, Californians have no way of knowing who’s guzzling the most water. That’s by design, thanks to an obscure 1997 measure that weakened one of the state’s chief open government laws.
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No way to tell if US inspectors of foreign food are doing their job
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Your milk’s not contaminated with drugs, FDA says
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration released the results of a study completed over two years ago, which found that more than 99 percent of the milk samples it tested were not tainted with drug residues.
There could be arsenic in your rice. Here’s how to avoid it
Despite pressure from consumer advocates, the federal government has failed to set a limit for arsenic in rice. Officials still are studying the difficult question of whether arsenic in rice has cumulative, long-term health effects.
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Dairy cows get treated with a variety of medications to help them fight illness, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has yet to release the results of its inquiry – started more than four years ago – into whether these drug are showing up in their milk.