The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [29]
When the test results came back, I breathed a sigh of relief and took a cool sip of Quibell, a delicious bottled water from West Virginia, to replenish the water that had left my body in the exhale. (We lose three quarts of water a day from breathing, perspiration, and elimination.) All eleven metals, all coliform bacteria, all twelve pesticides, and all forty-nine organic compounds (solvents, petroleum derivatives, and by-products of chlorination, with names like isopropylbenzene and bromochloromethane) occurred at only small fractions of the EPA’s Maximum Contaminant Levels, and most of them were below the lowest levels that WaterTest’s sensitive instruments are able to report. The only difference between the water lying around all night and the fresh water in the afternoon sample was that the first contained more iron. Lead was no problem.
If I were more nervous about my health, the reports from WaterTest might not have been so reassuring. Critics blame the federal EPA for leaving hundreds of contaminants unregulated and for not pressing local water systems to comply with the rules. Critics of the critics say that our ability to detect these chemicals in incredibly small amounts has outdistanced our knowledge of what it all means for the public health. Those who drink bottled water to sidestep these controversies will be horrified to read studies by McKone and Andelman showing that the amounts of organic compounds you absorb through your skin in the bath or inhale in the shower can exceed the amount you drink. Think of your shower as a gas chamber.
I am grateful that so many people are worrying about the safety of my water, because they leave me free to worry about its taste.
The first problem to solve was this: How do you describe the flavor of an ideal water? I telephoned Arthur von Wiesenberger, author of two books about bottled water (H2O, Woodbridge Press, and The Pocket Guide to Bottled Water, Contemporary Books), and he generously faxed me a professional rating sheet. Water should be clean tasting, colorless, odorless, refreshing (not heavy or stale), and thirst quenching (without a residue). Water is downgraded if it is cloudy or smells metallic or musty or like chlorine, plastic, sulfur, or chemicals. Other professional testers add that water should not taste soapy, salty, waxy, muddy, or sour. By these standards, the pristine quality of an Alpine spring is nothing but the absence of flaws.
If this were true, then totally pure distilled water (there is no such thing, but you can come pretty close) would be the ideal. Yet almost everybody agrees that distilled water tastes awful—except for people who sell home water distillers and some friends of mine who are clinically paranoid about chemicals in their environment. I bought a gallon jug at the drugstore, took a few sips, and swallowed them reluctantly. On the theory that the water simply needed to be aerated, I whirled a cup of it in the blender for a few minutes. The taste was still unpleasant in a way that is difficult to describe—certainly not sulfurous or chemical or any of those adjectives, just stale and unrefreshing and slightly bitter. It was obvious that perfectly pure water does not come close to the ethereal Alpine spring.
I telephoned two scientists who have done important research on the taste of water, Linda Bartoshuk at Yale and Michael O’Mahony at the University of California at Davis. They explained that distilled water tastes bad because it doesn’t taste anything like saliva. Yes, saliva.
Saliva is salty. But we lose our awareness of its constant presence as our taste buds adapt to the level of salt it contains. As