I have always wondered about this myself. You hear over and over again that people in antiquity never drank water, only beer or wine, because it was safer. My thought was always, "Really?"
I mean, first of all, you have the cost. Water is free, assuming you live near a source of it. People didn't have a lot of disposable income to throw around on buying enough beer to survive (about half a gallon per person per day).
Second of all, it seems like a resoundingly modern perspective. No one even knew what germs were until the 1800s. People in antiquity blamed a lot of things for disease, including miasmas (bad smell), an imbalance of the humors, and having too much blood in your body. What they did not blame was water.
Assuming the water looked fine - was clear, cold, and didn't have a weird smell - everyone assumed it was fine. We know that this is not true, of course. Water can be clear, cold, and odorless and still carry a wide variety of horrors, from giardia to cholera and (shudder) Guinea worm.
It turns out that I was right to be skeptical of this claim. Historians have noted plenty of instances of people mentioning drinking water in a casual, everyday context. Surprise! People drank water all the time.
I suppose the real question is why we are so eager to believe that people drank wine or beer instead of water. Perhaps it feeds into our belief that people were stupid idiots up until 100 years ago or so. Perhaps we admire their perceived ability to walk around drunk all the time without suffering any ill effects. (Personally I don't understand how people in the 50s got through a three martini lunch and went back to work afterward. But that's a different story.)
Image courtesy Flickr/Jenn Durfey
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