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From the London Review of Books, July 4:
The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialised Beverage
by Christy Spackman.
California, 289 pp., £25, December 2023,
Among all the things that people take into their bodies, water is special, its necessity matched by its neutrality. There’s no doubt about the necessity. Human bodies are mostly water: about 60 per cent in adult men; a little less in adult women. Without water, death comes within days. A sedentary man of roughly normal weight, living in a temperate climate, requires about three litres per day; women need less; athletes and people living in tropical environments more. Thirst is generally a reliable indicator that your body needs more water. It has become fashionable to pay close attention to maintaining due ‘hydration’, but for the most part a normal response to thirst takes care of that. The sensory neutrality of water is more problematic. The French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said that water had ‘no taste, no colour, no odour’. But that judgment has to be qualified.
In ancient Greek thought, water was one of the four elements; in modern science, water is H2O, a compound of two elements, but the water in rivers, lakes, seas and wells, let alone the stuff that flows from household taps, is never pure. Water dissolves and contains bits of all the things it has passed through over millions of years: inorganic minerals like the salts (chlorides, sulphates, carbonates) of calcium, potassium, magnesium and sodium. Even rainwater, reckoned especially pristine, contains dissolved atmospheric gases, so its purity is of the not-quite variety. These dissolved minerals are one signature of the water’s provenance – its terroir, as they say in the wine world.
‘Taste and Odour Wheel’ for the drinking water industry.
Even if naturally occurring water is never pure, the idea of water contains the idea of purity. In secular mode, water washes off dirt; in sacred mode, it washes away sins. Purity is always threatened by pollution. You do not want your drinking water to look cloudy (‘turbid’) or coloured, though rust-coloured, iron-containing spa waters were once very fashionable; milk-white glacial meltwater may or may not be potable; and naturally bubbly spring waters command a fancy price. You do not want to see rotting organic matter floating in your water and, even if you cannot see it, smell often betrays its putrefying presence. Traditionally, such water was said to be ‘foul’ or ‘fetid’, and, prior to the development of reliable municipal water systems, people encountered stinking water all the time and learned to avoid it if they could.
Water that smelled bad wasn’t just disgusting; it was thought to be dangerous. In the mid-19th century, the great English sanitary reformer Edwin Chadwick pronounced that ‘all smell is disease.’ He was pointing to the role of stinking vapours – ‘miasmas’ – rising up from putrefying matter. These miasmas – the word was derived from the Greek for ‘pollution’ or ‘stain’ – caused morbid conditions (cholera, malaria, typhoid fever, dysentery) in people who drank the putrid water or breathed the infected air rising up from it. Smell was accounted a reliable index of risk. In London, the Thames had long been used as a common dump for human and animal excrement. In 1855, the chemist Michael Faraday was horrified by the river’s appearance and stink: ‘The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid’; ‘The smell was very bad’; ‘The feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface.’ The coincidence of unbearable stench and epidemic disease seemed to confirm Chadwick’s dictum and eventually spurred one of the great feats of Victorian engineering – Joseph Bazalgette’s vast metropolitan sewer system.
The germ theory of disease that gained currency in the last decades of the 19th century provided a new vocabulary for talking about the risks of foul water, but new concepts reinforced old sensibilities. In the 1780s, Thomas Henry, an English medic, wrote that ‘the drinking of putrid water is not only highly disagreeable and disgusting, but extremely noxious to the constitution.’ From the early 19th century, both private and governmental action was taken to make municipal drinking water palatable and safe. You could use quicklime (calcium oxide) or alum (aluminium sulphate) to precipitate obnoxious matter from a relatively small quantity of water, or you might use charcoal filtration to clarify it. Slow filtration through sand was carried out in Scotland from the early years of the 19th century; in 1829, the Chelsea Waterworks employed sand filtration for water drawn from the Thames; the Metropolis Water Act of 1852 prohibited taking household water from the tidal reaches of the Thames and mandated effective filtration. The idea that chlorine might ‘cleanse’ water was current from at least the mid-19th century, but from the 1890s microbiological discoveries inspired municipal suppliers in England, Germany and the US to chlorinate water to make it ‘germ-free’.
This is where Christy Spackman takes up the story. An American sensory scientist now working in parched Arizona as an academic commentator on water policy, Spackman thinks we shouldn’t take the modern water supply for granted. She wonders whether the water delivered to our taps really is neutral and tastes of nothing at all. How has the widespread assumption of water’s neutrality come about? Who gets to say what water does taste like, how it ought to taste, whether its sensory aspects do or do not testify to its quality? How do you know if the water is good?
By the early 20th century, in most European and North American settings, the urban water supply had been made safe, or at least far safer than it had been in the past. Waterborne infectious disease had been substantially eliminated – a signal achievement of city life made healthful. Outbreaks of cholera almost always happened elsewhere in the world, and when they did happen in a ‘civilised’ society, it was a sign that modern infrastructure had broken down and needed urgent repair. (In 2010, the UN acknowledged a supply of clean water as a universal human right.) The control of water supplies was shifting – from free-for-all private enterprise to government regulation and then to government control, with medical and scientific expertise informing its effective management. In England and Wales, water was in the charge of a patchwork of local governments before it was passed in the 1970s to ten regional water authorities. In the 1880s, Joseph Chamberlain had argued that the control of water and sewerage could never be subject to the profit motive, but a hundred years later Thatcher made England and Wales the first countries in the world to have a wholly privatised water system. (Water remains in public hands in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the US has a sprawling mishmash of over a hundred thousand independent systems, mostly publicly controlled, and regulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA.) There were now political institutions you could complain to if you thought the water tasted odd or if there were reasons to think it unsafe. Government authorities would, ideally, respond to public discontent; private bodies might respond – if profits and shareholder value were thought to be at risk or if governments required them to do so.....
...Previously on "God is saying you have too much money":
I'm in the Wrong Business Part 625: "$20 for a bottle of water? Your water sommelier will bring the menu right away"
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Trifecta, We Have a Hot Sauce Sommelier To Go Along With The Mustard Sommelier and the Water Sommelier