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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

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It may have also been useful as a reward at the end of a laborer’s dull day, turning the bland water of his evening into pleasant wine.

Until relatively recently, wine and beer (even low ABV) may well have been preferable because they generally are safer for various water-bourne diseases. Also tea, in which the water is heated.

The main reason beer is safer for water-bourne diseases is because you boil the water before making beer. The other is that spoiled beer tastes absolutely foul.

The whole "beer was drunk because it was safer" thing is purely a myth. The advantage was that 1) most people rather like the effects of alcohol and 2) beer is a fairly easy way to get calories when you're doing heavy manual work.

How can it be a myth if it is true? I'm sure some redneck everyone made fun of said: "ma pa drank nothin but beer and never got the colora"

Because it isn't true: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol1h45/deleted_by_user/h5bjn7s/

Typical askhistorians drivel. Just list a bunch of ambiguous anecdotes and let your authoritative tone carry the day.

If a water source was clear, odorless, and cold, they'd consider it quite drinkable.

An obvious but rather limited understanding of water’s drinkability.

Pliny the Elder preferred well water best of all, while Columella preferred spring water and put well water beneath that.

So there was no elite consensus, but even if there was, it does not translate to common understanding.

We can also look to what happens when someone messes with the water. If the myth were true, we should expect not much of a reaction, since people could simply avoid the water by turning more to alcohol.

Does not follow. All it requires is people believing that water can get dirtier and that beer is expensive.

And there is the example of a case from 1262. In Siena, a woman was accused of deliberately poisoning the fountains. The punishment was to be flayed alive and burned.

When they got sick from drinking the water, their primitive understanding naturally lead them to suspect poison, and so innocents died.

In 1367, some men of the papal marshal's retinue thought it was a good idea to wash a puppy. Right in the main basin of a fountain. This drew the attention of one of the local women, who roundly castigated the men.

You can use this anecdote either way: the retinue did not care about the water.

Mind you, they also justified this avoidance of water with some Roman-era treatises, but let's be real: it's because they didn't want to drink water if it could be helped.

This guy, who by his own admission made it his life’s work to kill this “myth”, turns into a mind-reader all of a sudden. So when common folk considered the drinkability of water, they were at the cutting edge of contemporary science, but when the turn came for beer’s assessment, they reverted to an animalistic mindset.

So the myth of 'Medievals drank alcohol because the water is unsafe' has a long, long provenance, to the Medievals themselves.

There you go, even the medievals said so. Everywhere else, he takes them at their word. But his ax to grind won't let him do so here.

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