Before the wise men discovered Sanitation

[cmdr_zoom]

W.C. Fields' famous line about what fish do in water is only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. For much of history, people rarely drank "pure" water, often because what they had was anything but. (Would you like a nice tall glass of cholera with that, sir?) Instead, they tended to drink lots of very dilute alcohol: barely-brewed "small" beer, watered-down rum aka "grog", etc etc. This was not so much to get drunk - they had harder stuff for that, though a mild day-long buzz probably helped insulate them from the general suck of their lives - but simply to kill what might otherwise be growing, floating and/or swimming in the barrel. Yummy.

So give thanks to your local water treatment plant, and that you live in an age when salt and booze are flavorful additions to a meal rather than vital preservatives. (As I've said before, stuff like this is why when people ask what time I'd most like to live in, I always answer "right now.")

Comments

[seawasp]

And the usage of rum on naval vessels used to be... astounding. I remember a site that catalogued the use of rum on one vessel and it was some literally incomprehensible number of gallons.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Yep. The calculation's a pretty simple one: In the British Royal Navy between 1756 and 1850, each man was entitled to a half-pint (one cup) of spirits per day, normally mixed with a quart of what passed for water on shipboard, and some citrus juice if they had it, and served in two portions during the course of a day.

A seventy-four (a typical line-of-battle ship of the era, so called because they mounted 74 great guns) in British service generally carried around 800 men, which makes 50 gallons of rum - just the rum, mind you, not the water too - per day. Seventy-fours were customarily provisioned for three months at a time; a 90-day supply would thus be 4,500 gallons - something in the neighborhood of 14 Imperial tons - of rum.

While I'm throwing out boggling statistics, too, keep in mind that by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a seventy-four was a fairly small ship-of-the-line, a third-rate. The Royal Navy's first rate went up to 120-gun ships by then, with crews of more than a thousand. The Spanish even had a ship with 136 guns on four decks, the Nuestra Señora de la Santísima Trinidad; they put around 1,050 men aboard, but you can bet that if the British had managed to put her in commission (she sank in a storm after they captured her at Trafalgar), they'd have jammed on 1,200 or more. The Royal Navy in the age of sail liked their crews too big for comfort, so that they could fight both batteries and operate the sails all at the same time if necessary, and soak a certain (appalling) casualty rate without losing appreciable fighting efficiency.

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

As an aside, we do live in an age when salt is a common preservative. Perhaps not a vital one but if you buy it in a supermarket and it's labeled "no artificial preservatives" then chances are it's loaded with salt -- sodium chloride -- as a preservative instead.

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

When white folks arrived in the new World, they were shocked and horrified to find the inhabitants drinking water right out of the streams, which unlike European streams, were relatively safe to drink. Of course the settlers fixed that fast by poluting the streams and introduucing alchohol.

This is why the introduction of tea was such a big deal. Boiled water+ flavouring+stimulant was a sort of opposite way to handle the dangerous water issue from constant mild buzz.

[the2belo.livejournal.com]

A-frikin'-men, brutha. All hail the 21st century!

[caluche.livejournal.com]

You're lucky not only in the time you live but the place you live. Much of the world is still drinking non-purified water and on top of that live in countries with religious sensibilities that forbid drinking of alcohol.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

You're lucky not only in the time you live but the place you live.

Believe me, I'm very aware of that on an almost daily basis. As far as I'm concerned, I've already won a lottery just by being born here and now.