The age-old debate over what makes water ‘natural’

A YEAR ago, French newspaper Le Monde and Radio France broke a scandal in big water: Perrier was filtering its product. The filtering began due to worries about water contamination linked to climate change and pollution of spring sources.

It was also revealed that executives at parent company Nestle and French government ministers tried to keep it all quiet. They allegedly covered up reports of contamination and changed the rules to allow micro-filtration.

Under EU law, for a brand to market its products as “natural mineral water", it has to remain unaltered. French mineral water companies are now awaiting a ruling on what level of filtration is considered illegal “treatment". The result could mean that, after 160 years, Perrier will no longer be able to call its product “natural mineral water".

Strikingly, the same issue was debated extensively by scientists during the 18th-century European spring water boom. These men considered the effects of human intervention on the product and what was lost in the process.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, medical interest, in addition to factors like travel for leisure, resulted in the proliferation of new spa towns across Europe.

In England, Buxton and Tunbridge wells developed in the 1620s and 1660s, respectively, while Harrogate, Cheltenham and Leamington came in the 1710s, 1750s and 1790s. Historical surveys place the number of spas and wells offering healing mineral waters at around 350 in the 18th-century heyday.

Spas like Bath, Buxton and the Bristol hotwell were thermal, offering hot bathing. However, other spa sources in England were not heated. This meant that those who wished to bathe had to do so in the cold, which was undesirable and, at that time, considered dangerous. This was due to fears that the English cold climate when combined with exposure to cold water could disrupt bodily rhythms and cause illness.

As a result, many cold spas focussed on offering health benefits through drinking their water. When hailing the qualities of the newly discovered water at Scarborough in 1660, a Yorkshire doctor, Robert Wittie, declared it had “gained such credit" that people “come above a hundred miles to drink of it, preferring it to all other medicinal waters they had formerly frequented."

He later described the health benefits that he had gained from drinking it: “I had lost two pound and a half of my weight… I found after it better agility of body, and alacrity of spirit than before."

In 1654, Dr Edmund Deane had similarly described the effects of the water of Knaresborough: “Those waters at the Spaw do presently heal, and (as it were) miraculously cure diseases, which are without all hope of recovery."

As the number of spas grew, so did the options for consumers. As a result, the 18th century saw increasing attention and experimentation on mineral waters by scientists. Rather than question the water’s health benefits, they compared waters from various sources with one another, experimenting on them to determine the processes that produced and changed healing properties.

For example, a British doctor, George Turner, translated and expanded upon a German work about the spa of Bad Pyrmont in 1733. His work discussed experiments on the water of the spa and the minerals that could be determined within. It noted that if left standing, the carbonated water lost its potency: “Whence it is, that so spirituous a liquid does so easily turn to a flat insipid water."

He also suggested that boiling caused mineral water to lose some invisible element that was important to its proper functioning. “Why so many globules of air arise out of mineral waters when it is warmed?" he asked, only to conclude that when “spirits fly out of any liquid", they go “incognito without any tumult." As they “flew", so too did whatever gave these waters healing properties, making chemical recreation in a lab impossible.

Historians of science suggest that works like this foregrounded the concept of “gas", which came more conclusively later in the century.

During experiments on the Scarborough water, Dr Peter Shaw and natural scientist Stephen Hales each sought to determine the nature of the “subtle sulphurous spirit" in which, they felt, the “principal virtue of the Chalybeate (flavoured with iron) waters resided."

Similar experiments also involved extensive filtering, with physician John Nott in 1793 adding solutions to the waters of Italy’s Pisa and France’s Verdun before filtering them and performing further tests on “what remains in the filter."

Scottish physician Thomas Short had concluded previously that filtering waters was an important natural process. He described “the several strange alterations that water undergoes by being strained through different strata of minerals." He also claimed that the body inherently filtered “raw" mineral waters through its skin when bathing, allowing only those smaller minerals in to provide the health effect.

These scientists used their burgeoning chemical understanding to conclude that the processes performed on waters fundamentally changed them, going from “spirituous" cures to “flat insipid water". Even lacking the full knowledge or vocabulary to express why, they felt their processes and tools were incapable of recreating the waters of nature.

Legacies of these ideas can be seen in our changing attitudes to food and drink. Modern branding and consumer value is placed on a lack of processing. We are increasingly concerned with capturing and consuming the natural — as it is, before human intervention muddied it.

In so doing, we continue the ideas of those concerned with mineral waters all that time ago. By filtering their waters, no matter how little Perrier claims it affected them, we feel as though some spirit of the natural has perhaps been lost.

Courtesy: The Conversation

Daniel Gettings is a seasonal tutor, Department of History, University of Warwick.

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