[MR] wow.... just wow

[Maymunah al Siqilliyah]

I disagree on the idea that wells were safer then than now because of 
modern pollution.  The location (and depth) of your cemetery, your 
outhouse and your well in relationship to each other is crucial to clean 
water.  They did not understand bacteria, had no method of testing water 
safety.    A well that was just fine can go bad almost overnight if a 
poorly maintained outhouse contaminates ground water.

On 1/31/2011 8:52 AM, Kelly Keck wrote:
> On Sun, Jan 30, 2011 at 2:55 PM, Alexandria Stratton<kyrilex at yahoo.com>wrote:
>
>> I'm not sure I'd agree with that.
>> Water is required to make beer and wine. If the water is bad, then so will
>> be
>> what you make of it. Boiling water was certainly a practice, as we've seen
>> from
>> various recipe sources. Fresh water was abundant in many places, and the
>> Roman
>> aqueducts were still in use for quite a while after the Empire fell. Folks
>> did
>> know how to dig wells, after all, and ground water was not nearly as
>> commonly
>> contaminated as it is today...(no nuclear waste dumps upriver)
>> Besides, one needs water to survive. The alcohol content would have had to
>> equal
>> that of distilled spirits to kill the alleged bacteria, which is a level
>> unattainable for beer&  wine. In short, if the water was bad, then the beer
>> was
>> bad, they'd both make you sick&  die. Besides, alchohol dehydrates the
>> body...
>
> Did anybody catch "How Beer Saved the World" on the Discovery Channel last
> night?  It did mention the "water not being safe to drink" issue, and they
> verified it with a lab test.  They tested water from a duck pond and
> confirmed the presence of bacteria found in duck poop in that water.  They
> made it into beer, in a process that involved boiling, and the bacteria were
> not found in the beer.
>
> Though, I'm sure a lot of water sources were perfectly safe.  You wouldn't
> want to drink from a river in a city, but you make a good point about wells
> being likely safer than they are today.  The problem is, without germ theory
> or any way to test water, it's hard to tell which is safe and which isn't.
>
> Adriana
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