Why tap water sometimes tastes really bad

Who will defend the poor spud? 

I know that we've moved past, as a society, past the complete demonization of carbohydrates, which is good. People have a tendency to really hate on the white potato and I don't understand why. I mean, one, they're delicious, but also it's a ding dang vegetable. It's not a Twinkie, but it often gets lumped in the same category as with the other simple carbs, like white flour and white bread and, I don't know, macaroni and cheese. But I mean, there's got to be some like redeeming qualities in a potato. It is an edible plant after all. Aren't we supposed to all be eating more plants? Adam: Thank you, Kim from Louisville.

Nice to see you again. Potatoes absolutely are full of starch and starch is very easily broken down by your body into glucose which you rapidly absorb into your bloodstream, thus spiking your blood sugar, which is a problem for most people these days living in rich countries at least. I do think there is legitimate reason to be wary of too many potatoes in the modern developed world diet, especially the way we usually eat potatoes, which is generally deep fried or otherwise highly processed and fattened up; however, there are certainly far worse things to eat than fresh potatoes. Historically speaking, potatoes are almost the perfect food. White potatoes are shockingly nutritious in terms of vitamins and minerals and such, not just in terms of their carbs. White potatoes are arguably more nutritious than their very distant cousins, the sweet potatoes. And historically speaking, humanity owes a huge debt to white potatoes. Whenever potatoes have failed us, it was usually because we failed the potatoes.

Now you be the judge, you be the jury. I will be the lawyer representing potatoes. My client, the potato, is a nightshade like the tomato and like a tomato, it grows fruits. Google image search "potato fruits" and you will see these little clusters of tiny green tomato looking fruits, berries. They may even eventually turn kind of orange when ripe, or they may turn a dark purple and look like cherries when they're ripe. But cut a potato fruit open, they look exactly like cherry tomatoes on the inside. Just don't eat them. They are super toxic, potato berries are.

They're filled with solanine, the bitter alkaloid that likely evolved in these plants as an insect repellent. If you see a green potato, that's a potato that was exposed to too much light and air prompting it to produce solanine to protect itself from insects. The potato is basically saying, "Oh crap, I've grown above ground. Now bugs can get me. I've got a grow some solanine to kill them.". A very green potato can absolutely make you very sick, though that probably wouldn't happen because it would taste bitter and you would stop eating it unless you were starving. That's a thing that happens in starvation situations, where people end up eating green potatoes and dying from them. The fruits, the berries of potato plants are always super toxic according to every botanical reference that I can consult.

You usually don't see potato fruits on the plants though unless you get an unusually cool summer because in the heat of the summer, the flowers will just drop right off the plant as soon as they bloom before they can ever be pollinated. If they're not pollinated, you don't get the fruits. You usually don't get the fruits unless you have a weirdly cool July.

Nobody makes an effort to grow potato

Fruits because they are only good for getting potato seeds and potato seeds are only good for doing high level breeding or research work on potatoes.

You would not want to grow potato plants from seeds. If you did, it would take several years before the plant produced tubers underground of any remotely edible or delicious size. Potatoes are perennials. The above ground part dies back every winter, but the plant lives.

It stores energy underground in its root system in the form of a big swollen root called a tuber. That's the potato that you eat. If you just leave it in the ground instead of harvesting it and eating it. New stems will shoot up out of the little eyes in the potato in the springtime and the plant will repeat the cycle. If you grow a potato from seed, it takes several annual cycles for it to accumulate enough energy via photosynthesis to fill up a big starchy delicious tuber, or two or three or four or five. Get a lot of potatoes from a good potato plant. Another reason nobody grows potatoes from seeds is because potatoes can't self pollinate. They can only pollinate each other and sexual reproduction like that will introduce a lot of genetic mutation from generation to generation.

That is the whole point of sexual reproduction. One of them. It's bad if you have potatoes that you like and you basically just want to replicate those potatoes rather than having them mutate into something else. If you just want to replicate the potato you have, sexual reproduction is bad. You don't want to be developing a new breed. You like the breed you have. Luckily, there is a way to reproduce the potato that you want more of and that is to not eat all of the tubers. Save some of them as seed potatoes.

You put them right back into the ground, they grow a clone of the previous potato plant. Actually, arguably, it's the same plant. The plant is immortal. You just cut off parts of it and they keep growing. It's like growing any other plants from a clipping. You get a basically identical plant, genetically. You can even take the tuber, cut it into multiple pieces, and as long as each of those pieces has an eye on it, each will grow into a new plant and you'll get a ton of tubers from each one that you can dig up and eat and just save a few of them to replant for next year. Some of the most fun you can have gardening is to plant potatoes because digging them up is like a treasure hunt and there's usually a lot of treasure.

Potatoes are incredibly productive. Modern potatoes with modern farming produce about 18 million calories per acre. Compare that to wheat, modern wheat, modern farming, it's 6 million calories per acre. 18 with potatoes, six with wheat. Every ancient proto agricultural civilization in the world coalesced around grains as their staple crop.

Wheat, rice, barley, except in the Americas.

I mean, maize, corn, that's a grain

And it was the staple of ancient mesoamerican civilizations, but american civilization did not begin in mesoamerica, it began in south america where the potato was first domesticated.

Wild potatoes grew and still grow all over South and Central America and up into the southern United States where I am.

Scientists used to think that multiple far flung indigenous American people domesticated wild potatoes independently, but then in 2005, a US Department of Agriculture botanist working at University of Wisconsin named David Spooner, made the case and apparently convinced all of his colleagues that all domestic potato varieties have one single origin 7,000 years ago on the shores of.

Lake Titicaca high up in the Andes mountains on the border of modern day Peru and Bolivia. That's where they all come from, the domesticated ones. Potatoes are easy to grow. They grow in all kinds of climates as long as you replant seed potatoes rather than waiting for the actual potato seeds. They're incredibly productive, far more productive than grains on a calorie to acre basis. That's particularly important around the Andes where there isn't a lot of flat farmland available. The problem with potatoes as a staple crop is that they are wet.

They're filled with water, which makes them heavy to carry around with your nomadic hunter gatherer tribe or with your army on campaign. Also potatoes, because they're filled with water, generally only last a matter of months if properly stored somewhere dark and dry, whereas properly dried and stored grains can last years. The Incan civilization up in the Andes, much later civilization, but the Incan civilization, they eventually fixed this problem with potatoes by developing chuno, the staple food of their empire. Chuno is freeze dried potatoes. They didn't have enough hot sun up in the Andes to dry corn, but they could in the right months of the year freeze dry potatoes. You leave them out, you let them freeze overnight, and then they thaw in the hot sun the next day. This damages their cells, that freeze thaw cycle. It damages their cells, liberating cytoplasm, liberating water, which then evaporates in the sun during the day.

You do this across five consecutive nights with the right weather and you've got yourself freeze dried potatoes, chuno. Grind it into flour, boil the flour into a porridge when you're ready to eat. Incans built their empire on chuno, though interestingly, the dominant modern potato species, Solanum tuberosum tuberosum, is not from the Andes. It's from the islands off the coast of Chile, way, way, way, way, way down south from Peru. Somebody brought the original domesticated potatoes from up there around Lake Titicaca. Somebody took that all the way down to those islands off the coast of Chile where they cross bred them, intentionally or not, with local wild potatoes on those islands and now we have Solanum tuberosum tuberosum from which most modern potato cultivars are derived. It just speaks to how that western spine of South America was a real superhighway of ideas and technologies and cultures and people in the ancient world, that narrow strip of coast between the Andes and the Pacific. I've never been to South America.

I really, really want to see Peru and Chile and southern Argentina, Tierra del Fuego. One day I'll get there. Anyway, potatoes were an awesome staple crop for ancient people for all the reasons discussed. The chief botanical function of the potato is to store energy, calories, through the winter, and so they help you to do that as well. The potato is mostly water, but after that it's mostly starch, which is just sugar stacked up into long lines or branches that are difficult for microorganisms to digest. That's probably the main reason why plants evolved to store their sugar in the form of starch. But you and I, we can digest starch very easily, especially amylopectin, which is the branched form of starch. Most starch in potatoes is amylopectin, which our digestive enzymes have absolutely no trouble breaking down into individual glucose molecules really fast.

Eating cooked starch is basically like eating sugar to a human in terms of its effect on your blood sugar.

For most of human history, that was

Great because most humans needed as many raw and ready calories as they could get their hands on.

The conquistadors knew a good thing when they saw it and weren't afraid to steal it. They brought back potatoes to Europe with them. Potatoes became a staple crop all over Eurasia, particularly in Eastern Europe and of course the Anglo-Celtic isles. Of course, Ireland. If you have poor soil and not that much of it, potatoes are great. They weren't that popular in Ireland until the turn of the 19th century and it became the staple food there chiefly because mostly English landlords were increasingly taking all of the other food to feed the Napoleonic wars and also the Brits liked beef.

They wanted more and more beef and more and more acres in Ireland that had previously been dedicated to farming grains became cattle pasture. The Irish only had a few acres left to grow food for themselves, and so potatoes, 18 million calories per acre, right? The potato famine in Ireland was probably a political problem more than it was an agricultural problem, but there was a real agricultural problem there, and that is lack of genetic diversity.

Potatoes aren't from around there. Europeans brought only a few kinds of potatoes back with them from the Americas and they didn't change very much genetically once they got to Europe because people generally don't reproduce potatoes sexually. They plant seed potatoes and seed potatoes get you clones. So, very little genetic diversity. When a blight showed up that killed potato plants, it killed them all because they were all equally susceptible because they were all clones of each other. But that's not the potato's fault, that's our fault.

Nor is it the potato's fault that most people in Ireland and every other highly developed country these days have access to way too many calories, way too many quickly digested carbs. Most of us don't need all that starch, but we need fiber and potatoes have a fair bit of fiber if you eat the skin, which is one of the many reasons I usually don't peel potatoes. We need potassium. Potatoes are excellent sources of potassium and of vitamin B6 and vitamin C, believe it or not. If you only ate potatoes, you would not get scurvy assuming you ate enough potatoes. You could also get all of your essential amino acids, your protein, from eating a lot of potatoes. White potatoes have twice as much protein than sweet potatoes. It's still not a lot of protein, especially if you're trying to get lean and jacked, but it's probably enough protein to survive on if you get enough potatoes.

If you only lived on potatoes, eventually you would run into calcium deficiency and vitamin. A deficiency. Sweet potatoes have a ton of vitamin A that's that's why they're orange. If you complimented your white potatoes with sweet potatoes, that would get you pretty far. You probably wouldn't get all your essential fatty acids from potatoes and lots of other B vitamins that you need. You can't live on just white potatoes for very long, but you could live on mostly white potatoes forever and, look, healthy or not, the bottom line is potatoes are one of the few foods that are still affordable, even as inflation has made food around the world 11% more expensive this year.

Sam: Hey, Adam. I originally went to the beach and why is beach water so gross all up and down the. East Coast at least? Even when you cool it down, it tastes gross and I feel like the most weird thing to me is that it feels like thick, viscous, in my mouth. I'm basically just packing seltzers every time we go to the beach right now. It would sort of be nice to solve this mystery.

Thanks. Adam: Just to clarify, Sam is not talking about drinking sea water at the beach. He's talking about drinking the tap water supplied by beach adjacent communities, municipal water flowing through the pipes that you drink from the sink in your hotel or wherever that you're staying at at the beach. Such water does indeed tend to taste terrible because of sulfur. I imagine that we all like to imagine that our tap water comes from some pure cold running mountain stream, like up in the volcanic hills around Rome. You imagine this pure mountain water rushing down the. Aqua Appia or one of those other gorgeous stone Roman aqueducts into the heart of your city. Or we like to imagine that our tap water comes from some kind of high tech purification facility where everything is quadruple filtered and reverse osmosified or whatever, but neither of these ideals is generally accurate.

I mean, sometimes it's accurate. New York City is not historically a model of great municipal hygiene. Maybe it is now because of how insanely rich it has become, at least in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn. But when I was growing up in. Pennsylvania and driving into New York all the time, the smell of that city was hot garbage, literally hot garbage, half the year. Hot garbage NP is what I remember of New York. City as a child.

The David Dinkins years and the early

Giuliani years, back when your parents would coach you on not making eye contact and walking with intentions so that you don't get mugged walking around midtown manhattan, a notion that is kind of laughable today.

 

I mean, I'm sure people still get mugged there today sometimes, but it used to be really common. I knew lots of people personally who had been mugged in the city, and then the global financial class fell upon Manhattan like a giant bag of gold de doubloons and crushed everything good and bad under their incalculable weight. I assume it's evident to everybody at this point that Rudy. Giuliani is no genius. Giuliani did not transform New York, it was the global financial class. Anyway, NYC, not historically a model of hygiene, but they have legit pure mountain water, delicious, delicious, pure mountain water from a system of reservoirs and a few natural lakes up in the Catskill Mountains and down through the Hudson. River Valley. Legit beautiful places.

I love upstate New York. I would not want to live there again. My one winter in Rochester nearly killed me literally, but Rochester is really the Midwest. That's the flat industrial western side of New York state. People generally say the Midwest region begins at Ohio, but I have long argued that western. New York and western Pennsylvania are far more Midwestern in landscape and culture and in their economies than they are Northeastern or mid-Atlantic. Pittsburgh is really a Midwestern city, culturally. Buffalo is a Midwestern city.

Rochester, Erie, PA, all of those industrial cities on the lakes, those feel super Midwestern to me, not northeastern, way more like Chicago than New York, and they tend to have bad tap water, which is weird given that the Great Lakes constitute the world's largest surface freshwater system. 20% of the Earth's surface fresh water is in the North American Great Lakes, and yet tap water in Cleveland is super expensive and not that great. I mean, it's fine, it's safe, but tap water in the Great Lakes is notoriously expensive for several reasons. One, they obviously can't just suck water right up from the edge of the lake where the cities are because that water is too polluted. I mean, it's not nearly as polluted as the days back when the river in. Cleveland caught fire. The de-industrialization of the upper Midwest has been economically catastrophic but environmentally beneficial. Nonetheless, the water along the lake shore is still pretty polluted, so they have pipes that suck water from miles out into the lake.

When they get that water, they still have to do lots of filtration and purification steps. Then the big thing that makes the tap water expensive up there is all of the old, old pipe infrastructure, all the old lead pipes and the constant work of gradually replacing all of that infrastructure. New York City water does not come from the arguably Midwestern half of upstate New York. It comes from the mountains of eastern upstate New York, a historically industrial area for sure, but that was back in the first industrial revolution, which was powered by water. Water wheels. You build a mill next to a fast moving cold river. Fast moving for obvious reasons, more energy, more kinetic energy. You get that from a mountain river where the grade is steep.

It just falls faster.

And you want that river to be

Cold because cold water means less algae and other biological growth that can gunk up the wheel and make the wheel rot, gunk up all the little channels that you dig to channel water to your wheels.

Cold water is better, but not too

Cold, not too cold such that everything freezes in the winter.

It's a real Goldilocks situation and the two parts of the world with the magic combination of climate and topography and access to raw materials for the first industrial revolution, they happen to share the same name, these two places. England and New England. Of course, that's probably more than just a geographic coincidence. In fact, it's a logical correlation that pokes a hole in geographic determinism, which is an interpretation of world history that I probably over-embrace. Yes, I do think the physical shape of the world and how the climate whips around that shape, I do think that probably does determine a whole lot about the people who live on any given spot in the world, but that's certainly not the whole story.

England and New England were the hotbeds of the first industrial revolution because they shared similar geographic features, yes, but also because they shared people. It's called New England because people from England settled there and that's how English inventors of mill equipment came to design and build factories in the Americas. It's not just that they shared geography, they shared people. It was people who had the ideas. Geographical determinism does not determine all. But then I suppose you could argue that it was geography that determined that English people would settle in New England in the first place. I mean, it was right across the pond and eastern upstate New York is really more New England than it is mid-Atlantic. You had lots of water mills up and down the Hudson Valley converting the kinetic energy of running rivers and streams into torque that could power a million different machines by means of ingenious systems of gears and wheels and belts.

Water mills were not as clean as we romantically imagined them to be. They impeded the flow of rivers creating backwater, areas of stagnant water that could become very stinky. Water mills were terrible for the fish in the rivers, just as hydroelectric power plants are terrible for fish today. There used to be salmon, Atlantic salmon, in the rivers running into Lake Champlain and Lake Ontario, salmon in the Connecticut River, all wiped out by dams that kept them from reaching their spawning grounds. Salmon spawn up in fresh river water. They get eaten by bears, but their babies hatch and swim down river out into the lake or the ocean where they live most of their lives, and then one day they get an itch to swim back up river. They start to dream of somewhere to relax their restless flights, somewhere out of a memory of lighted streets on quiet nights. They can't get back there because a dammed mill pond is in the way, so no salmon left in New York.

Water mills were not environmentally blameless, but they were far cleaner than the factories of the second industrial revolution powered by coal and oil and gas. The factories that sprang up in the Midwestern United States and down south during reconstruction. Once a cold, fast moving river stopped being the power plant for your factory, well, there was no reason then to have a factory tucked up in the mountains where labor was both scarce and organized. The labor union movement in America was born in the early mill towns. If you can run a mill anywhere thanks to coal and steam, well, then you might as well swing down South where formerly enslaved people would be willing to do just about anything other than share cropping, which was basically agricultural slavery by another name and, oh hey, not coincidentally, that's also where they grow the cotton that you weave into cloth in your mill.

So yeah, build your factory somewhere like Macon, Georgia where I used to live. That's a thing that happened. You can do that as soon as you don't need water power anymore for your mill.

All the old water mills in upstate New York sat vacant for almost 100 years and then people started converting them into artist colonies and antique stores and luxury loft apartments. Point is, thanks to this particular pattern of low impact industrialization followed by de-industrialization, you've got beautiful clean cold water in upstate New York today, at least in the eastern mountains. That water flows conveniently down south into the pipes of New York City. New York City for all its flaws has really great tap water. I do not believe the lore that states that the secret to New York style pizza is New.

York City tap water.

There just isn't a lot of non-water stuff in basically clean water, not a lot of solutes in clean water. It's enough that you definitely taste it when you're just drinking the water, but by the time you stir in a ton of flour and salt and such, I just don't believe it.

Maybe the mineral content affects the gluten and the starch on a chemical level that might affect texture or workability of the dough or something, and certainly pH affects how doughs stretch and brown and mineral content affects pH, but clean tap water really shouldn't be too far away from a nice neutral seven.

If it is, somebody at the water treatment plant has done screwed up. It's a different story in brewing or maybe soup making because there you're talking about products that are mostly water and so you might taste the quality of the water there, but I really doubt that it affects the flavor of breads much at all. I'm ready to be proven wrong. If anybody wants to mail me a gallon of NYC tap water, I'm game. Get in touch. Please don't poison me.

Water quality can definitely make a real difference in coffee, which is why.

Macon, Georgia, where I used to live, has great tap water. Great tap water. It won best of the best award for taste in 2009 from the American Waterworks Association. Best tasting water in the whole country that year according to an organization that exists in part to give awards to its own members, but that's fine. The Oscars are basically the same deal, right? Macon, Georgia water tastes great in part it because it comes from a lake rather than from a river. Even unpolluted river water can be pretty gross, especially down South where it's warm and rivers are more hospitable to life of all kinds. The current churns up all the gunk at the bottom, all the sediment, the organic and inorganic sediment at the bottom. Southern rivers are brown mud slicks.

Macon used to get its tap water from the Ocmulgee. River that runs through town. It's a pretty yucky river like most rivers in the southern.

United States.

Just big brown mudslides. Then came the flood of 1994. It was called the worst natural disaster in Georgia history. Tropical storm Alberto over the Florida panhandle joined up with a cold front from Alabama to make the perfect storm, as they say.

12 inches of rain on the 4th of July weekend in Macon. The Ocmulgee flooded and there's old news photos that you can see online of gas stations and fast food places underwater, but that wasn't the main problem. The Ocmulgee always used to flood, so people generally did not build right in the flood plain. The problem was that the flood took out the water and sewage treatment plant that was right on the river. The taps stopped working, the toilets stopped working. 200,000 people were without modern plumbing, almost three weeks. The flood also took out the major highways, which paralleled the river as roads have done for millennia because people have always walked along rivers to know where they're going. It was hard for them to truck in bottled water to Macon.

President Clinton came down to feel everybody's pain and they were in pain. Three weeks without clean running water or flushing toilets is a pretty dire situation. It seems like it shouldn't be given that humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years without clean running water or flushing toilets, but those humans were adapted to those conditions. We are not. It's rather like how people lived without air conditioning up until like 50 years ago. You would think that we could handle a summer without air conditioning given that our ancestors lived all of their summers without air conditioning. They were adapted to it. My old house in Macon built around 1917 long before air conditioning and it had several features adapted to sweltering southern summers.

It had a big front porch. A big topic in southern cultural studies is how social relations changed once everybody in the South got air conditioning and they stopped spending every evening out on their front porches, gabbing with their neighbors and eavesdropping on other people's conversations and gossiping about them, et cetera, all on the front porches.

My old house had a really big front porch. Loved it. It had big windows and the rooms were built such that they had big windows on multiple walls. You had a window at the front of the room and another window on the side of the room or in the back of the room and you could open both sets of windows so that you could get a cross breeze flowing through the room that keeps you cool. My old house also had this weird fourth bedroom in the back. We couldn't really figure out what the deal was with this room.

It seemed a little too small to be a bedroom and it was only accessible by walking through one of the other bedrooms. It was not accessible by a hallway or some other more public space in the house. The walls in this little room were made of modern sheet rock, drywall, rather than the other walls in the house, which were all the original plaster. It just didn't make sense until I learned about sleeping porches. Sleeping porches were basically screened in balconies that Southerners built onto the backs of their houses, always the back of the house, because you wouldn't want people on the street to see you waddle out to your sleeping porch in your evening clothes and lie down on the little second bed that you kept out there so that you could actually sleep on the hottest nights of the year.

Better to sleep outside than not at all.

At least the screen keeps out the mosquitoes.

My house was well adapted for its climate and then everybody got air conditioning.

Air conditioning was a better way to keep cool, that's why they switched to it. The house gradually lost its climate adaptations. The old rope and pulley windows got stuck one by one as those windows always do, and people who lived in the house just kind of stopped repairing the windows and then somebody painted the windows shut, just painted over the windows and let the paint dry inside the little crevices between the windows and the frames, thus sticking them together.

We could not open our windows in that house, any of the windows, and most of the time you wouldn't want to. Air conditioning takes a lot of electricity. Electricity is expensive and so you want to keep your conditioned air safely sealed up inside your house as much as possible. We couldn't open our windows because we had lost our climate adaptations and that was fine because we wanted to keep them closed to keep in the AC. At some point, some prior owner of our house decided to wall in the old sleeping porch.

They decided that the sleeping porch would be more useful if they put up solid walls, fully sealed it in just like any other room in the house. That way when they sold the house, they could list it as a four bedroom house, even though this supposed fourth bedroom was tiny and only accessible by walking through a door in the main bedroom. It made a great room for the baby's crib, I have to say. But the house lost its climate adaptations and that was fine until the air conditioning broke one day in July, or maybe it was June. Regardless, it was heat of the summer and we did not have $5,000 with which to buy a new compressor. What we had instead was a brand new baby and a toddler in a half body cast because he broke his leg the day after his brother was born for the second time. It was the second time that he broke his leg, not the second time that his brother was born. Either way, his mother was in real rough shape and the house was a furnace.

People who lived in that house in the 1920s had babies and plaster casts and all kinds of other problems in the middle of scorching summer, but they also had windows that opened and a sleeping porch. Now when cities lose power in the middle of the summer, people die. Hundreds of people, dozens maybe die because the buildings have lost their climate adaptations. Likewise, the tap is now our only system for getting clean water. Back in the day, people who had didn't have taps, well, they had other systems like building their house next to a well or a stream. If you believe your house will always have a running tap, then you don't bother building it next to a well or a stream, nor do you bother acquiring the knowledge of how to safely and effectively draw water from a well or from a stream. Taps are better than wells or streams until water stops coming out of them one day because a tropical storm flooded your water plant that was by the river because the river is where the water comes from. It's the logical place to build the water plant except for the fact that rivers sometimes flood.

After the disaster of '96, everybody in Macon resolved to not make the same mistakes again. Macon bought some land up in Jones County, way up. It is up high in the hills, high above the river in altitude. They spent lots of money pumping river water up into that reservoir to build what they call Javors Lucas Lake, named after the incredibly long serving. Macon Water Authority board member Javors Lucas, a pillar of Macon's Black community. He attended. Tuskegee Institute to study engineering, fought in World War II in the Pacific, but he wanted to be an artist like his father, Henry W. Lucas so he studied photography in the army and ended up photographing a B-29 bomber called the Enola Gay shortly before it dropped the little boy bomb on Hiroshima.

Javors Lucas also worked at a water treatment system for the Army Corps of Engineers a little bit.

When he got back home, he served

37 years on the macon water authority commission so they named their new reservoir after him.

They built it big, way bigger than Macon would need. They figured that they could make some money supplying water to other faster growing communities in the area, and maybe they could also attract some new industries that require large amounts of very clean water reliably. Lots of industries are like that. The water is clean because in a large deep reservoir, all the sediments settle onto the bottom so you don't have to do as much work filtering that water before you send it down to people's taps. It's easier to send down to people's taps because most of the taps are topographically down relative to the high altitude of the lake so gravity does the work and it will never be flooded, this reservoir, because it's way up high relative to the river, which is down here. The Water Authority still owned a whole bunch of land right on the river where their water treatment plant used to be, and that land wasn't really good for anything else because of the flooding, so they decided to turn it into a giant park, Amerson Waterworks Park.

180 beautiful acres, a giant open lawn where I ran our old dog Lucy around for the last time before she died. It was later where I flew kites with our kids for the first time, meandering trails through the woods where we pushed their strollers.  As long as I can remember my own life, I will love Amerson Park. One day there was a big storm and the park flooded. Pale brown silt from the bottom of the mighty Ocmulgee covered up everything and the park had to be closed for weeks while they cleaned it up. People in the comment sections of local news articles said, "Hey, whose stupid idea was it to build a park right next to the river that floods?". They posted these comments apparently unaware that the whole reason Amerson is a park and not a water treatment plant is because it floods.

You can't do anything else with the land, so you might as well use it as a park. Anyway, some great city fathers and mothers had the foresight to invest in a good large, deep, relatively high altitude reservoir. Now Macon, Georgia has the best tasting tap water in the nation. In 2009. They usually leave that part off, that they only won the award once 13 years ago, but they still have really good tap water all the time, way better than the tap water where we live now in Knoxville, Tennessee, which comes not from a reservoir where all the silt and other gunk can settle and sink to the bottom, but it comes straight out of the Tennessee River, another loose stool of a southern river, the Tennessee River is.

I mean, they treat the river water before they send it to you in the tap, but it does not taste as good as the water from Javors Lucas Lake. Most tap water in the United States comes from surface water like a river or a lake or a reservoir, or it comes from the ground. Only about 1% of the Earth's fresh water is on the surface in things like lakes and rivers and permafrost.

69% of the Earth's fresh water is locked in glaciers and polar ice caps, rapidly melting. Not quite as locked as one would hope. The remaining 30% of Earth's fresh water is deep in the ground and we pump it up to the surface from wells that we dig. Groundwater occurs in aquifers, layers of sand or gravel or permeable rock like limestone, all soaked in water, rocky sponges basically. Groundwater is particularly crucial to people trying to farm in the vast semi-arid stretches of the American interior where much of our food is grown here. Far more groundwater goes to irrigation here in the United States than goes into people's taps. Irrigation supplied by aquifers is totally essential to modern farming. Here's a fun fact, and by fun of course, I mean terrifying.

Of all the groundwater within a mile of the earth's surface where we can actually get at it, less than 6% is renewable according to one estimate that I found and I found other scientific estimates as low as 1.5%. The rest of the groundwater is non-renewable. Once we've pumped it all up to irrigate our crops, it's gone.

Strictly speaking, of course, all aquifers are renewable.

Water ran down into that permeable limestone

Once and so it probably shall again, but not within the span of human lifetimes.

That's a thought that keeps me awake at night. Anyway, groundwater. Some groundwater tastes amazing, but some of it tastes like the ground, particularly like limestone unsurprisingly.

Groundwater tends to be what they call hard water, high in dissolved minerals, mostly magnesium and calcium from the limestone. Calcium you can taste in the water and it tastes kind of salty, kind of bitter, kind of chalky. You can see it with your own eyes. The scale that builds up on your shower head, that's deposits of minerals left behind by hard water, particularly very hot hard water because of how rapidly it evaporates and leaves behind its solutes. And then there is sulfur. When your tap water tastes or smells like rotten eggs or like farts or like dead things, that's going to be your chemical element number 16, ma'am. That's going to be your sulfur. Sulfur is your problem right there.

Or more specifically, sulfate and hydrogen sulfide. Sulfates are polyatomic ions, combinations of sulfur and oxygen, and they are common in lots of wet soil and rock formations underground where our wells reach the sulfates just dissolve gradually into the water and they smell like farts. Hydrogen sulfide is a gaseous chemical compound that is literally the smell of death, or rather it is one of the hundreds of gaseous compounds emitted by decaying organic matter, many of which contain sulfur. Hydrogen sulfide is often found in large underground deposits in proximity to ground water, as in the case of wells that are drilled near, say, fossil fuel deposits. But the main source of hydrogen sulfide in drinking water is bacteria, generally non pathogenic bacteria. They eat sulfur and they poop out hydrogen sulfide, which smells like death. These bacteria are happy in low oxygen environments like deep, deep wells. These bacteria are also heat tolerant.

They're an example of an extremophile, or an organism that thrives in environments where you'd think nothing should be able to live at all. You may have heard about sulfur eating bacteria found around underwater volcanic vents where it's just so hot and there's no light, no organic matter to eat. It seems like nothing should be able to live there, but these bacteria can because they don't mind the heat and they eat sulfur and sulfur bubbles up from the bowels of the earth. In fact, there's a bacteria species that lives deep beneath the silt off the coast of Namibia called the sulfur pearl of Namibia. This bacteria, a single one, is almost a millimeter wide. You can see a single bacterium with your naked eye. It eats sulfide, and to do that, bacteria normally need oxygen, but there's no oxygen dozens of meters down deep beneath the silt off the coast of Namibia so these bacteria use nitrate instead of oxygen to metabolize the sulfur. There's also not a lot of nitrate down there either, so this bacteria relies on big storms that stir up the silt and bring nitrates down from the surface.

You only get a storm like that once in a while So these bacteria grew insanely large for the purposes of storing nitrates for a rainy day, as it were. I guess it's the opposite of a rainy day is what they need it for. Anyway, sulfur eating bacteria are extremophiles and as a result, they're often found in hot water heaters and pipes and such. They're perfectly happy in the heat and you are more likely to smell their gaseous products when you have the water running really hot because heat makes everything more volatile, so you smell it. I remember going to visit my Ohio grandparents out in the country where they had to dig a well because municipal water didn't go all the way out there and whenever anybody took a shower, that whole house smelled like a fart. Otherwise, I have very happy memories of that house. Getting back to Sam's question from a half hour ago, one reason why tap water in coastal communities might taste bad is that they are getting it from wells, deep wells.

When your city is on the ocean,

Most of the surface water around you is either salt water in the ocean, which you can't drink or brackish water in the mouth of the river that empties into the sea next to your city.

 

That's probably why you built a city there in the first place because a big river opens up to the sea right there, and thus people can sail from the ocean up into the hinter lands from that spot. That's a logical spot to put your harbor and your trading post and all of that, that spot where salt and fresh water mix. Can't drink that water either, so you've got to dig a well to get fresh groundwater. You might have to dig a particularly deep well to get down into the part of the water table where there is no salt water intrusion from the ocean. Deep down there, you could be easily dealing with any of the sources of sulfur that we just discussed. Sam specifically mentioned the eastern seaboard of the United States, most of which is the North American coastal plane, which is a line of super sandy soil all up and down the eastern seaboard, super sandy soil that was deposited there over millions of years by rivers emptying out into the sea. Sandy soil tends to leach sulfur as we discussed in the article from last year about Vidalia onions. The Vidalia region near coastal Georgia has super sandy soil because coastal plain rain flushes sulfur from decaying organic material on the surface.

The rain flushes that sulfur down through that sandy soil where it eventually settles and collects deep down below the sand, deep down where you might have to drill your well in order to avoid salt water intrusion closer to the surface so your water tastes farty, but at least you can grow really sweet onions because there's hardly any sulfur on the surface where you farm.

Maybe you do have access to a fresh water source. You have a lake that just happens to be near your coastal beach community, or maybe you have a reservoir that you fill with river water before the river gets too close to the sea and mixes with the salt water and becomes brackish. Sam asked about the beach specifically, and by that I think he means coastal communities that people visit for fun. Those are usually down south where it's warm and where it's warm there is life in the water like algae. Algae is a really common problem in lakes and reservoirs in warm places. Algal metabolites can be stinky, one example being geosmin, the smell of dirt that we talked about in a article not too long ago. Another is called methylisoborneol Isoborneol? I'm just going to call it MIB.

Everybody calls it MIB anyway. It's MIB. Another problem is MIB, which smells musty. That's another algal metabolite, all metabolites common in surface water sources in warm climates such as beach towns because algae. Lastly, Sam mentioned that water at the beach tastes thick to him. If it's very hard water from a well, lots and lots of dissolved minerals, very hard water, water can taste almost slimy, or people call it scaly water. People often address hard water by treating it with water softeners. Water softeners might use sodium ions to pull minerals out of the water.

The result is slightly salty water, which people often describe as tasting slippery or feeling slippery on their skin. To me, it tastes kind of warm. Another explanation that I've read is that soft water feels slippery on our skin because it does not have the dissolved minerals that normally stick to us a little bit. The mixture of dissolved minerals and soap that sticks to our skin and to our shower walls, that is known unappetizingly as curd. Fun fact. But maybe what you're feeling is the salt. I suppose it's possible that some coastal water supplies are particularly salty thanks to a little salt water intrusion or maybe, I don't know, incomplete desalinization in the case of fresh water produced by a desalinization plant. There are also cationic polymers used as flocculents in water treatment.

Flocculent, there's a disgusting word. They stick to decaying organic matter. They cause it to clump up and then settle out of solution at the bottom of the tank at the treatment plant. I've read that cationic polymer residue from water treatment can also feel slimy when you drink it. Have I given you enough guesses yet, Sam? That's the best I've got. Well, actually, I've got one more guess. Everybody wants to go to the beach. I want to go to the beach.

You want to go to the beach. Everybody who owns or governs beach property knows that everybody wants to go to the beach and so they don't worry so much about their water. The people who own or govern these properties, they know that people will want to go to the beach no matter what, even if everything else about the trip sucks. They figure, "Hey, we might as well not bother wasting money on improving the taste of our tap water. Tourists going to come no matter what." .