alt Hacker News> As far as I can tell, water-drinking was not particularly common
Based on what? You certainly haven't given any indication of having read what historians have to say.
Granted, that subreddit could be a cabal of people colluding to make us think humans didn't go through a phase of drinking beer rather than water. It seems easier to believe you're trying to justify your own talking out of your ass if you can't respond to specific claims.
> In the old days, clean water was rare
What does this mean? Clean water was arguably much more common than it is today because of industrial contamination.
> What I do claim is that people did drink lots of beer for thirst in various contexts (listing exactly which would make this too long).
Nobody contests this. What is contested is fear of drinking water.
> I've worked on this for a decade, collecting archive accounts from around Europe. I can quote you pages and pages and pages and pages of people writing about how they used to drink beer against thirst every day.
Great! Pay up! I ain't reading your book.
Btw, you don't need metal to boil water. And beer is healthy if you're faced with a calorie deficit; it's loaded with nutrients. Perhaps you should use this as an argument for why people drank beer (allegedly and confusingly instead of water)
> I don't claim that people explicitly avoided water
Yes you did:
> And was this why people drank beer instead?
If you did not mean to imply that beer drinking came at the deficit of water drinking, you should consider rephrasing.
> What I do claim is that people did drink lots of beer for thirst in various contexts (listing exactly which would make this too long).
I have no doubt that someone in history said this, just as they did now; what I find hard to believe is that this was in any way normal or typical. One citation might be more meaningful than this entire thread. If you can provide a source, please do so.
Hell, I drink beer for thirst myself; against all rational judgement. This doesn't imply my tap water is unclean.
> Based on what? You certainly haven't given any indication of having read what historians have to say.
I am a historian. This is based on 10 years of reading ethnographic archive documentation of what people used to drink on farms, plus of course wide reading of ethnographic and historical literature on this.
> Clean water was arguably much more common than it is today because of industrial contamination.
Industrial contamination is not the issue. The issue is bacteria and other micro-organisms. This page is very good https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterborne_disease
This is what toilets used to look like, from a museum in Gotland, Sweden. https://img.garshol.priv.no/photoserv.py?t378684
Now imagine the effect on your well, which usually would be downhill from the houses.
> Nobody contests this. What is contested is fear of drinking water.
Actually, lots of people contest that people used to drink beer, but that's fine. Let's move on.
I agree fear of drinking water is tricky. Evidence on this one way or another is hazy and ambiguous, but it seems to be more a preference for beer. What motivated the preference is again tricky to pin down.
It's easy to come up with quotes showing aversion to water. Just look at the first page of Linné's "A Description of Beer" (actual title in Swedish) from 1749. It says straight out that many kinds of water are harmful and therefore people prefer beer. But it doesn't mean this was a general belief, and there's plenty of evidence the other way.
> Btw, you don't need metal to boil water.
I already linked to a paper on how to boil water without. But it does mean that it was difficult. And people didn't know they needed to. So they didn't.
>> I don't claim that people explicitly avoided water
>Yes you did:
Quote is missing or garbled somehow.
> > What I do claim is that people did drink lots of beer for thirst in various contexts (listing exactly which would make this too long).
> I have no doubt that someone in history said this, just as they did now; what I find hard to believe is that this was in any way normal or typical.
I think at this point the best thing I can do is point you to this, which is a relatively superficial summary of the evidence as I know it: https://www.garshol.priv.no/blog/433.html
Note the map with coloured dots. Every single one of those dots is a primary source where someone describes their own home parish.
The subject deserves a proper paper, but it's going to take a while before I have time to put one together.
That blog post is from 2022. Here's the state of that map today: https://imgur.com/a/K8YmqV7
Note that it was not just common to drink beer every day. French schools served wine with lunch until 1981. https://www.vice.com/fr/article/quand-les-enfants-buvaient-d...