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> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it. All we have to do is boil it, because we have a germ theory. If i'd been drinking from the same well f
by jfoutz 10y ago
> If you want safe water, all you have to do is boil it.
All we have to do is boil it, because we have a germ theory. If i'd been drinking from the same well for 30 years, I don't think I'd make the connection that the water was somehow bad unless it tasted funny or was cloudy.
However, if i acquire a taste for tea, a good fraction of my water is automatically purified.
Alcohol, of course, is a nice way to store those hard grown calories. Grapes don't last long, wheat gets infested with bugs and rats. Beer and wine keep for a while. And of course, also purified.
Archaic doesn't mean stupid. We are all lucky John Snow was so diligent. That was a tough connection to make. And of course, once it was discovered, people regularly boil water when there are issues with the local water supply.
We got kind of lucky by getting addicted to things that inadvertently had unknown positive effects. Which, in my humble, non immunologist or doctor kind of way, probably outweighed the really terrible negative effects of long term massive alcohol consumption.
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoAll this in addition to the logistics of simply boiling some water compared to the wine and beer. Water was a somewhat precious resource for most folks. You either fetched it from the well or from the source plus have a fire to heat the water over - a fire that you aren't going to need for that day's food. Not to mention that you might need to do this for your family of 6 and doing the rest of your chores - all of which took much more work than today. the beer or wine would have likely been delivered by horse and wagon if one purchased it. Otherwise, it likely would have been produced and stored on-site - the fetching would have been a bit different.
- cmdrfred 10y agoAlso this neglects the fact that beer was a way to store water. If you simply boil water and store it in a clay pot someplace, it is possible for it to become infected again due to the container having small openings. Beer solved this problem allowing for transportable, safe, ready to drink fluids.
- andrepd 10y ago> Water was a somewhat precious resource for most folks. Again, this is not true. Water only became a scarce resource for some when population density reached a certain point. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yts0v/comment/cfnrg32 https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1yts0v/comme...
- Waterluvian 10y agoDid anyone live long enough to die of long term massive alcohol consumption?
- bigbugbag 10y agoYes. It's a misunderstanding of the life expectancy metric to believe people lives were short. Actually if you made it into adulthood chances are you would live and grow old. The short life expectancy is due to a high risk of death as a baby or child.
- power 10y agoSeems life expectancy of 70 years was considered normal a couple thousand years ago: https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Psalms-90-10/ https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Psalms-90-10/ Edit: never thought I'd be quoting the bible here as evidence of something
- venomsnake 10y agoIt was not massive. Our current stuff is quite a bit harder.
- jfoutz 10y agoi think average lifespan was historically low because of infant mortality, and childhood deaths. If you made it to 20, you had good odds of making it to 60. Socrates was like 70. In order to die of something like that, you'd have to be pretty darn wealthy, i'd think. First, rich enough to survive childhood, and then rich enough to drink a lot.