> One person I'm thinking of in particular said she didn't believe the water was safe to drink there
I mean, if she meant water from the tap, it's true that it's generally not considered potable. It's clean enough for everything it's needed for, but it's just common sense to people to not drink from it. Expecting to be able to is weird because it's different. Seems kind of exorbitant to have something like potable tap water, like I'd imagine it'd be exorbitant for people that have it to upgrade to distilled tap water. The public tap water supplies being able to maintain water end-to-end pure enough to be perfectly consumable by humans is a bar probably nobody is concerned for them to surpass, because it's not really a problem.
The tap is used for everything you generally use it for elsewhere, including washing fruits, veggies, and rice. There's no problem consuming small quantities (e.g. washing teeth, using a glass that hasn't finished drying, etc.), but nobody drinks or serves a glass of water from the tap. People fill 5-gallon jugs of water at purifiers or exchange them at convenience stores and use that for drinking water and e.g. making soups, boiling/steaming foods, cooking pasta, etc.
> so how could the produce be safe to eat?
Did she mean the water it was grown with? If she did, yeah that's ridiculous. That water has to seep through the earth, so what does it matter? Why need to dump potable water? Also, a whole nation and more are living off that produce.