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By Root 1179 0

a result, we perceive less salty things as having a subzero kind of taste. Bartoshuk describes this as a kind of bitterness (one of the four basic tastes—bitter, salty, sweet, and sour); if we wash the saliva from our tongue with distilled water for several minutes, we lose our adaptation to saltiness and no longer perceive pure water as bitter. O’Mahony refuses to categorize this taste as bitter; he will not go further than calling it “distilled water taste.” Here I discovered a deep fissure in the academic world of taste: the O’Mahony school finds no physical basis for the existence of four basic tastes. After I have found the perfect water, I will return to figure out what this means for the world of string beans and crème brûlée.

I took out a book about saliva from the library and read it with fascination. Did you know that each of us produces three cups of saliva a day? Saliva contains about six hundred parts of sodium chloride—common table salt—for every million parts of liquid. By my calculations, this is about one-eighth as salty as chicken soup. I hurriedly added the right amount of table salt to distilled water and tasted it. After only a month of work I had managed to create … mildly salty water. Saliva is not an Alpine spring.

Then what is? Most scientific research about the composition of drinking water looks for the impurities that can make it harmful or unpleasant—not those that make really fine water taste that way—and bottled-water companies are secretive about which of the natural minerals in their products give them a delicious taste. I had heard that Pepsi-Cola is extremely careful about the composition of the water it uses, but the people in its research lab in Valhalla, New York, were completely lacking in the Pepsi Spirit when I asked them to share their findings. Table salt is not found in very many bottled still waters, but other substances are. I’ve found mineral waters containing gold and silver, platinum and copper, chromium and tin. But I was more interested in the mineral salts that water collects as it trickles and bubbles through the rocks and hollows of the earth. Some of these—calcium, potassium, magnesium, chlorides, and bicarbonates—are also found in saliva. Could it be that saliva minus the table salt equals an Alpine spring?

I turned to the few articles that have been published in scientific journals. A team of Japanese scientists writing in the Journal of Fermentation Technology concluded that calcium and small amounts of potassium are indispensable to the good taste of water, but that magnesium tastes rough and bitter. They also found that the silica picked up by water as it runs through clay is more important than other researchers had thought. Another study suggested that water with more than five hundred parts per million of minerals tastes salty, alkaline, earthy, bitter, or brackish. (By conventional definition, mineral water has more than five hundred parts per million.) Volvic and New York City tap contain about a third of this, and they, I found after extensive tasting, are the most pleasing to my taste. Evian and saliva are near the upper limit of mineral content and acceptability.

These taste judgments were roughly confirmed by a company in Massachusetts called Ionics, which sells water-purification equipment to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Santa Barbara. Once Ionics has completely purified the best available local water, it adds mineral salts to make the water taste fresh and clean and balanced. After working with taste panels, Ionics has decided on 45 parts per million of calcium, 61 of bicarbonates, 45 of chloride, 2 of sulfates, and 1.8 of sodium. I have doubts about the chloride.

Now I was ready to create my own water. I drew up a shopping list, got out the yellow pages, and found that one of the largest chemical supply houses in Manhattan is located a few blocks from my apartment. At its offices, I presented my list and tried to interest the two employees in my spellbinding project. Chemicals come in all degrees of purity, and I specified the “ingestion grade” whenever