Having access to fresh water is not the same as saying any puddle of water was 100% safe.
You bring up traveling when the vast majority of people did not travel. At all. Maybe to the next market if we talk later medieval period but that was it really. (I do use bottled water when traveling because I am only used to the local bacteria and it is easy to get sick at first when going to a new country.)
As you write most settlements especially early one were very self-sufficient. So they would have some source of water that could be safely consumed. Remember, even for beer brewing you need to start with clean water. Sure heating it up helps with bacteria but you can't brew beer with dirty swamp water. It will be gross.
The whole antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jews poisoning the well only works if people were actually drinking from the well. Not that antisemitism needs to be very rational but it shows that people had a considered safe source of water they regularly drank from.
> But if I may posit something - the average person's distaste for drinking plain water is somewhat universal across time and cultures and might very well be a human adaptation.
I don't think hunter-gatherer societies where big on beer brewing. The whole building settlements thing is a very recent innovation in evolutionary terms so probably not enough time has passed for such a trait to become relevant.
Plus I mean our brains like sugar and carbohydrates very much, we quickly learn to crave alcohol and coffee. We can already explain why people might drink something else than plain water.
If we both went into a time machine, and had to make the choice, I think both of us would still end up drinking the small-beer over even the most pristine local water.
But regardless, this is still not a strong argument that we need to "debunk" the history as the original author is trying to do. We have written primary sources from the dawn of writing until the modern temperance movements in the 1800s that all basically say the same thing - humans in any agricultural society ended up supplying the majority of their hydration from prepared sources of water. Access to clean water was about bathing, preparing food or drink, and the occasional drink of water.
Regardless of how safe their water was or was not to drink, medieval people still ended up drinking small-beer a majority of the time if they could help it.
> The whole antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jews poisoning the well only works if people were actually drinking from the well.
Not really. Independent of people drinking directly from the well:
* animals are watered by getting the water from the well.
* food is prepared with water from the well
* ale is prepared with water from the well
and so on. All of these things would subsequently be poisoned if the well was poisoned. They needed a safe source of water, but that does not imply that they drank it directly.
You bring up traveling when the vast majority of people did not travel. At all. Maybe to the next market if we talk later medieval period but that was it really. (I do use bottled water when traveling because I am only used to the local bacteria and it is easy to get sick at first when going to a new country.)
As you write most settlements especially early one were very self-sufficient. So they would have some source of water that could be safely consumed. Remember, even for beer brewing you need to start with clean water. Sure heating it up helps with bacteria but you can't brew beer with dirty swamp water. It will be gross.
The whole antisemitic conspiracy theory of Jews poisoning the well only works if people were actually drinking from the well. Not that antisemitism needs to be very rational but it shows that people had a considered safe source of water they regularly drank from.
> But if I may posit something - the average person's distaste for drinking plain water is somewhat universal across time and cultures and might very well be a human adaptation.
I don't think hunter-gatherer societies where big on beer brewing. The whole building settlements thing is a very recent innovation in evolutionary terms so probably not enough time has passed for such a trait to become relevant.
Plus I mean our brains like sugar and carbohydrates very much, we quickly learn to crave alcohol and coffee. We can already explain why people might drink something else than plain water.