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I'm not entirely sure I buy this argument. There are vast swathes of the world today where drinking tap water will likely make you sick, and in all these count
by resolutebat 2y ago
I'm not entirely sure I buy this argument. There are vast swathes of the world today where drinking tap water will likely make you sick, and in all these countries it is standard procedure to boil tap water before drinking it. In fact, in eg China & Indonesia, cold water (even if clean) is believed to be bad for you and drinking still warm boiled water or weak tea instead is very common. Was medieval England really an exception?
- deepsun 2y agoAnd in all of those places you'd usually noted how bad is the taste of water, so many people knew it's unsafe not just from tradition, but also from the bad taste. The difference between now and medieval England is that we know taste is not everything, that even "sweet water" can be dangerous unboiled.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago> And in all of those places you'd usually noted how bad is the taste of water, so many people knew it's unsafe not just from tradition, but also from the bad taste. Considering the strength of the Chinese taboo on cold water, I find that fairly unlikely.
- schmidt_fifty 2y agoMy understanding is this is rooted in the perception of hot water as a luxury—it's not like we have any shortage of evidence from chinese texts that people have always drank cold water. The idea that most people even could avoid cold water is an artifact of the last two centuries. Even where boiling water was necessary water was boiled and stored (that's not specific to my knowledge of China, that's just an observation from multiple different places and times). Of course I'm open to be demonstrated wrong.
- kergonath 2y agoWe often say that the US are not the world and that we should not assume that something is natural just because American do it. Well, it’s also true for China and overall people in a specific place having a specific taboo tells us very little about human health or their understanding of it. So no, a Chinese taboo on cold water does not tell us anything about a human tendency to drink water any more that a people’s taboo about pork is any indication that pork is unsafe (yes, this also is an urban legend).
- thaumasiotes 2y agoPeople in a specific place having a specific taboo can tell us a lot about how likely they are to engage in the tabooed behavior. The argument was that people in China would have noted the bad taste of their raw water. In order to do that, they would have had to drink it, which I find unlikely.
- hnlmorg 2y agoYou’re comparing England from ~800 years ago to modern day countries. That hardly seems fair. There’s a lot of knowledge we take for granted that simply hadn’t been discovered yet in medieval times.
- refactor_master 2y agoBut humans have been cooking stuff for thousands and thousands of years to improve nutritional value and kill off bacteria. Why would water be an exception?
- anthk 2y agoWater evaporates and people would think twice before 'losing' it.
- hnlmorg 2y agoBacteria wasn’t known about thousand of years ago. Nor were nutrients (in the sense that we know it now). There are a plethora of other reasons food might have been cooked, not least of all being flavour. The fact that it also killed bacteria would have been an accidental benefit. Also a lot of food actually loses nutrients when cooked.
- rrr_oh_man 2y agoI think you're underestimating humans who for hundreds of thousands (!) of years have been as smart as you and I.
- hnlmorg 2y agoIt’s pretty well documented during the Middle Ages that people thought it was the smell that made them ill and not any bacteria
- neuronerdgirl 2y agoAnd smell and bacterial levels are absolutely correlated