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III.12 - Water

from Part III - Dietary Liquids

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Christopher Hamlin
Edited by
Kenneth F. Kiple  and
Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas
Kenneth F. Kiple
Affiliation:
Bowling Green State University, Ohio
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Summary

The ingestion of water in some form is widely recognized as essential for human life. But we usually do not consider water as food because it does not contain any of those substances we regard as nutriments. Yet if its status as a foodstuff remains ambiguous, it is far less so than it has been through much of human history. Water (or more properly “waters,” for it is only in the last two centuries that it can really have been viewed as a singular substance) has been considered as food, a solvent for food, a pharmaceutical substance, a lethal substance, a characteristic physiological state, and a spiritual or quasi-spiritual entity.

This chapter raises questions about what sort of substance water has been conceived to be and what nutritional role it has been held to have. Moreover it also explores what we know of the history of the kinds of waters that were viewed as suitable to drink – with regard to their origins, the means used to determine their potability, and their preparation or purification. It also has a little to say about historical knowledge of drinking-water habits (i.e., how much water did people drink at different times and situations?) and water consumption as a means of disease transmission.

What Water Is

Modern notions of water as a compound chemical substance more or less laden with dissolved or suspended minerals, gases, microorganisms, or organic detritus have been held at best for only the last two centuries. Even earlier ideas of water as one of the four (or five) elements will mislead us, for in many such schemes elements were less fundamental substances than dynamic principles (e.g., in the case of water, the dynamic tendency is to wet things, cool them, and dissolve them) or generic labels for regular combinations of qualities.

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The Cambridge World History of Food , pp. 720 - 730
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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