Michael: Kevin, I'm going to make a bold claim. There's a good chance you're drinking water wrong. In fact, you might be drinking something that's more regulated than your tap water, but actually less safe. Kevin: Wait, what? I literally have a bottle of 'pristine mountain spring water' on my desk right now. Are you telling me I've been scammed by a plastic bottle? Michael: That's the billion-dollar question, isn't it? And it's exactly what we're diving into with James Salzman's fantastic book, Drinking Water: A History. Kevin: Right, and Salzman isn't just a historian. I read he's a distinguished professor of environmental law. That's a fascinating combo—he's looking at this not just as a story, but as a series of legal and ethical battles over who gets to drink what. Michael: Exactly. He uses water as this incredible lens to see how civilizations are built and how they fight over what matters most. And it all starts not with science, but with magic.

Kevin: Magic? What do you mean? Like, potions and spells? Michael: Pretty much. Think about the most enduring myths. One of the biggest is the Fountain of Youth. The book tells the story of the Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de León. In the early 1500s, he sailed to the New World, not just for gold, but because he'd heard tales of a mythical river that could restore youth. Kevin: Wow. So he wasn't just after treasure, he was after a time machine in liquid form. How did that work out for him? Michael: Not well. He landed in Florida, which he named, but he never found the fountain. He ended up dying from a poison arrow wound on a later voyage. The irony is thick. But the story itself is what's important. It shows this deep, primal human desire for water to be more than just… water. We want it to be miraculous. Kevin: That makes so much sense. This sounds like a brilliant marketing campaign. 'Drink this and live forever!' Is this where the idea of 'special' water comes from? Like the holy water at Lourdes or even... Perrier? Michael: You've nailed it. Salzman argues that the first-ever example of branded water wasn't Evian or Fiji. It was holy water from pilgrimage sites in the Middle Ages. Monks and church officials would create these elaborate backstories for their local springs, claiming they had divine healing powers. Then they'd sell the water in specially branded flasks to prove its authenticity. It was a huge business. Kevin: That is absolutely wild. So the blueprint for the modern bottled water industry was invented by medieval monks. But what about the myths we live with today? Michael: The book points to a perfect one: the advice to drink eight glasses of water a day. Kevin: Hold on. Are you about to tell me that's not true? My whole life is built on the foundation of eight glasses a day. Michael: Prepare for your foundation to crumble. Salzman points to a 2008 review in a major medical journal that found no clear evidence of benefit from drinking that much water. The idea seems to come from a misinterpretation of a 1945 government report. We get a ton of water from food—fruits, vegetables, even coffee and tea count. The eight-glasses rule is essentially a modern-day myth, a piece of folklore we tell ourselves about health. Kevin: Unbelievable. So from the Fountain of Youth to the eight-glass myth, we're basically just projecting our hopes and anxieties onto water. But at some point, the magic had to wear off, right? People must have realized this stuff could also be incredibly dangerous. Michael: Oh, absolutely. And that transition from myth to science is one of the most dramatic and deadly stories in human history.

Kevin: Okay, so if our beliefs about water are based on myths, when did we actually start making it safe? Because the book makes it clear that for most of history, drinking water was a death sentence. Michael: It really was. For centuries, in big cities like London or Paris, drinking water was a last resort for the poor. The wealthy drank beer and wine because the fermentation process killed the pathogens. Water was seen as dirty, a sign of poverty. And the reason was that cities were dumping all their waste—human and animal—directly into their water sources. Kevin: So the rivers were basically open sewers. How did we ever figure out how to fix that? Michael: It took a detective. The book tells the incredible story of John Snow, a London physician during a horrific cholera outbreak in 1854. The common belief at the time was the 'miasma' theory—that disease spread through bad smells or 'foul air'. Kevin: Right, the 'all smell is disease' idea. It sounds ridiculous now, but I guess it made sense if you lived in a stinky, overcrowded city. Michael: Exactly. But Snow was skeptical. He didn't think bad air could explain the pattern of the outbreak. So he started investigating, going door-to-door in the Soho neighborhood. He made a map, marking every house where someone had died of cholera. And he found a terrifying pattern: almost all the victims lived near one specific public water pump on Broad Street. Kevin: So he was basically the first contact tracer! That's incredible. What did he do? Michael: He took his map to the local authorities and, with the force of his evidence, persuaded them to do something radical: remove the handle from the Broad Street pump. And almost overnight, the cholera outbreak stopped. He proved, definitively, that the disease was in the water, not the air. It was the birth of modern epidemiology. Kevin: That one act—removing a pump handle—changed everything. It’s a story of science triumphing over superstition. Michael: It is, but the book also shows that the story of safety is never that simple. Take the fall of the Roman Empire. For years, people have blamed it on lead poisoning from their famous aqueducts and lead pipes. Kevin: I've definitely heard that one. The idea that they poisoned themselves with their own brilliant engineering. Michael: It’s a great story, but Salzman points out it's likely wrong. The water in Roman aqueducts was 'hard,' full of minerals, which created a scale lining inside the pipes, insulating the water from the lead. The real culprit was probably their diet. The Roman elite loved a sweet syrup called sapa, which was made by boiling fermented grape juice in… you guessed it, lead pots. They were adding a lead-based sweetener to their food and wine. Kevin: Oh, man. So it wasn't the public water system, it was a luxury good for the rich. It seems like making water safe is a story of solving one problem only to find another. We fix cholera, but then the book talks about the arsenic crisis in Bangladesh, where millions of 'safe' wells drilled by aid agencies turned out to be naturally poisoned with arsenic. Or how the chlorine we use to kill germs can create its own carcinogenic byproducts. Is water ever truly 'safe'? Michael: That is the perfect question, and it leads directly to the modern battlefield. The fight isn't just about safety anymore; it's about ownership.

Kevin: Ownership? You mean, who gets to turn the tap? Michael: I mean who owns the water before it even gets to the tap. And no story shows this better than the war between the tiny town of McCloud, California, and the global giant, Nestlé. Kevin: Ah, the bottled water behemoth. I'm guessing this wasn't a friendly negotiation. Michael: Not at all. McCloud was a former logging town, economically devastated after the mill closed. They were desperate. In 2003, Nestlé came in with a proposal to build a massive bottling plant, tapping into the town's pristine springs. They promised jobs and revenue. The town's board, seeing a lifeline, approved it. Kevin: I can see the appeal. If you're out of work, a huge new employer sounds like a miracle. Michael: It did to some. But a huge portion of the community felt, as one resident put it, "mugged." Another local gallery owner said the town "shouldn't sell its birthright for a few dollars." They formed a watershed council and fought back, hard. Kevin: Hold on, I want to play devil's advocate here, like one of the former mill workers quoted in the book. He basically said, 'These environmentalists put the timber industry out of business, and now they're trying to stop this. How much cleaner can you get than bottled water?' Isn't this just a case of outsiders preventing a struggling town from getting back on its feet? Michael: That was the heart of the conflict, and it tore the town apart. It pitted neighbor against neighbor. But the opposition argued that the contract was incredibly one-sided, written by Nestlé's lawyers to give them control of the town's water for 100 years at a ridiculously low price. They were concerned it would drain the aquifer and harm the sacred McCloud River, a world-famous trout stream. Kevin: So it became a battle over the soul of the town. What happened in the end? Michael: After years of legal battles, protests, and thousands of public comments on the environmental review, Nestlé finally gave up. In 2009, they withdrew their proposal. It was a huge victory for grassroots activism, but it left McCloud just as economically fragile as before. Kevin: Wow. So there's no easy answer. You either protect the resource and stay poor, or you sell it and hope for the best. That's a brutal choice. Michael: It is. And this story isn't unique. It's playing out all over the world. It forces us to ask a fundamental question that Salzman's book revolves around: Is water a commodity to be bought and sold by the highest bidder, or is it a public trust, a fundamental human right?

Kevin: It’s wild. We've gone from the Fountain of Youth to fighting over plastic bottles filled with what is sometimes just filtered tap water. It makes you look at that $3 bottle at the airport completely differently. Michael: So we've gone from believing water is magic, to engineering it to be safe, to now fighting over who owns it. The book shows that how we treat water is really a test of our values as a society. Are we a society that ensures everyone has access to the essentials, or one where everything, even life's most basic necessity, is for sale? Kevin: And the book gets a lot of praise for laying out that debate so clearly, but some readers have noted it feels very American-centric at times. The McCloud story is powerful, but the water wars in places like Cochabamba, Bolivia, which the book also covers, were literally life and death. Michael: That's a fair critique. The principles are global, but the focus often returns to the U.S. Yet the core dilemma remains the same everywhere. The book forces you to confront the hidden history and politics behind the simplest act of taking a drink. Kevin: It really does. It's not just H2O anymore. It's mythology, it's epidemiology, it's capitalism, all in one glass. Michael: Exactly. And that's the question Salzman leaves us with: When you turn on your tap or buy a bottle, what are you really paying for? Water, or a story? Kevin: A powerful question. We'd love to hear what you all think. Do you trust your tap water? Are you a bottled water devotee? Let us know your thoughts on our social channels. It’s a debate that affects every single one of us. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.