The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [28]
Bottled water costs more than gasoline, even at a discount supermarket; despite the frightening facts you read these days, there is still lots of fine, free tap water left in America. If New York City water were not treated with chlorine, it would taste as delicious as anything from a bottle, and even with recent ecological threats to the city’s upstate reservoirs, tasters from all over the world seem to concur. Chlorine is a greenish yellow gas with a powerful smell. It violently irritates the nose and throat, but it violently irritates bacteria even more, and so it has become a nearly universal disinfectant in public water supplies in America. Chlorine smells like Clorox bleach, and after you bathe in it, it reacts with your sweat and leaves you smelling like a boiled ear of corn, which some experts describe as the odor of human semen. An article in the Tea and Coffee Trade Journal considers chlorine the mortal enemy of coffee taste and aroma. Europeans (and most bottled-water companies) disinfect their water mainly with ozone, which does not dissolve in water the way chlorine does. Europeans apparently care more about the pleasure that delicious water can bring than about its germicidal sterility, and now some American cities are experimenting with ozonation.
My water is piped four miles down Fifth Avenue from Central Park, and after I’ve drunk my fill, it continues all the way downtown. Chlorine is introduced at Ninetieth Street, and because it dissipates as the water travels, enough chlorine must be added uptown so that some is left to disinfect the people on Wall Street, who are probably drinking Perrier anyway. In order that Wall Street may thrive, I must put up with water that tastes less perfect than it should.
One Star for Water
Sometimes Los Angeles reminds me of Arrakis, the planet known as Dune. One restaurant puts a note at the bottom of the menu announcing that its water is treated by the Aqua West Filtration System. I am not a connoisseur of California filtration systems. But if this becomes a trend, the choice of water-treatment device should definitely be a factor in every restaurant review.
This is just one example of the principle that bad-tasting water is not necessarily hazardous to your health and good-tasting water can possibly harm you. Too much iron or manganese makes water taste unpleasant; iron leaves rusty stains on your clothing; calcium and magnesium, the minerals that make water hard, turn soap into a sludgy mess, leave deposits on glasses and pots, and clog up your automatic coffeemaker. But none of these can hurt you in normal concentrations. On the other hand, many harmful or suspect chemicals can’t be tasted or smelled even at dangerous levels.
That’s why I sent off my water to be tested. Consumer Reports recommends a company in New Hampshire called WaterTest; I telephoned them at (800) 253-3506 and ordered up as many home tests as they have to offer. Within a few days I received a series of kits, snug Styrofoam containers filled with half-frozen plastic cold packs molded around little bottles with color-coded caps, some of them containing chemicals. I filled half the bottles at 7:00 a.m., before anybody else had drawn water, and the other half in the afternoon. The idea was to see whether the “first draw” of water lying in the pipes all night was more contaminated than the “full flush,” freely flowing water that has been coursing under the streets and through my building all day. Tap water in older cities on the East Coast and in the Northwest can become polluted with lead as it passes through lead pipes