Water Works I - Recap

Alton begins near a small monitor, noting that over time Good Eats has dealt with many ingredients. Dry pasta, steak, potatoes, salt, biscuits and peas have all featured in at least one episode. But in all that time the show has never offered more than a sideways glance at one of the fundamental ingredients of every recipe – a simple lopsided arrangement of one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms known as water. Essential for life but also the source of much death, destruction and disease, water covers most of the planet. Despite that the steadily increasing populations raise fears of shortages.

Every cooking operation depends to some degree on the successful management of water, Alton continues, yet cook books rarely mention it. Alton plans to remedy that omission by discussing water’s journey from nature to the home. What happens to it after that is the subject of another episode. Why? Because water is a might deep subject in addition to being... Good Eats!

Those awake on March 30, 1972 at 1:17pm and in Mrs. Baker’s science class already know everything about the water cycle. If you weren’t there, or if (like Alton) the old girl’s voice had lulled you to sleep... Alton recaps the water cycle. It begins with evapotranspiration, a long word that combines evaporation from the surface of lakes, oceans and seas with transpiration – the loss of water from animals and plants. That water condenses in the atmosphere as clouds, and when conditions are right precipitates as rain, snow, sleet, or other forms. Plants absorb some of the precipitation via interception; the rest of it stacks up on the ground as glaciers or in polar icecaps, or begins a long gravity fueled journey back to the lakes, oceans, and seas. Some goes underground; this is called ground water. The rest remains on the surface, as streams and creeks collect into rivers; this is surface water.

At a mountain stream, Alton recounts how beer ads have conditioned consumers to regard such streams as pure, but finding pure surface water in nature is always hit or miss. Why? Well, when animals come to make withdrawals, they sometimes also make deposits. Water supports every kind of microbial life there is – protozoa, parasites, viruses and bacteria. Alton wades along and discovers a quarter, which recalls that ancient folks often threw money into water to purchase protection from the wide array of nymphs and sprites thought to live around it. A hand extends from the undergrowth and Alton offers his quarter; before he gets more than a quick glimpse of the owner she flees...

Because it moves, surface water is a good place to get rid of things. Case in point is a pair of dark suited corporatus corrupti emptying the contents of a plastic drum into the stream. Alton surprises them and they run off. In fact, large scale dumping of industrial waste is largely a thing of the past, but runoff remains a problem. It sometimes contains toxic fertilizers.

Most water runs into oceans or lakes or evaporates, but some finds its way (with or without human help) into reservoirs. Alton rows a rubber dinghy across the City of Atlanta Watershed Management Facility, a large lake of decent looking water. But (as a pool owner will tell anyone), it’s easy to keep water clean when temperatures remain low. When temperatures go up, parasites and bacteria breed. Add a little mud and some decaying plant matter and you’ve got real problems.

Folks might now think underground water is better – but Alton cautions that monsters lurk there as well. Dipping a bucket from a well, he talks next about ground water. The United States sits on eleven aquifers holding eleven quintillion gallons (11,000,000,000,000,000,000) of water. Where does it come from? Rainwater and runoff seep into sand and pool atop less permeable underground layers of clay and shale. The top of this is the water table and its level changes with the weather. Wells that tap this aquifer can go dry during droughts. Fertilizer and other chemicals seep into the water and contaminate it.

Sometimes ground water moves between deeper impermeable layers. Such a confined aquifer moves very slowly. The water in this aquifer may remain underground for centuries or even millennia, on average. Artesian wells reach this deep and the water tapped often jets to the surface under its own power.

But most ground water eventually seeps to the surface as a spring, a topic to which Alton will return later.

Water from confined aquifers is as clear and clean as water gets in nature, but may still be unsafe. Why is safe drinking water so rare? The answer to that is 104.45 degrees – and that’s not a temperature.

Before leaving the subject of ground water, Alton reminds viewer who have wells to get them tested yearly, since the government does not certify the quality of such water.

Back in the kitchen, Alton elaborates on the mysterious number 104.45 degrees. This is the angle formed by the two hydrogen atoms attached to the single oxygen atom in water. The resulting shape might vaguely remind one of a certain famous amusement park’s mascot. But that shape is vitally important – it makes water a polar molecule, that is, a molecule that is negative on one side, and positive on the other. That makes it a molecular magnet. Just as a magnet can collect ferrous metals, water “collects” other polar molecules by hydrogen bonding with them. Examples include calcium, magnesium, radium and lead. Some of these are bad in any amount, most of the good ones may be bad if present in too large a concentration. Hydrogen bonding, Alton concludes, makes water an excellent solvent.

Water can extract proteins from chicken bones, creating stock. It can extract carbohydrates from coffee beans, creating coffee. And when it falls through the air, it even grabs carbon dioxide to form a weak form of carbonic acid. As carbon dioxide in the air rises, rain becomes more acidic and even better at dissolving what it contacts. All of that leads to impurities.

Back at the City of Atlanta Watershed Management Facility, Alton paces along a narrow catwalk about the flocculation tanks. Here, water passes over and around flocs – accretions of “sticky” chemicals such as alum. These flocs attract solids present in the water, gradually growing in size as they remove material from the water. This is the first step in water treatment. The clearer water and flocs then enter the sedimentation tanks, where the flocs drift to the bottom. There, large and slow-moving agitators gradually push the sediment towards drains where for removal and sale as fertilizer or compost.

Many techniques work to disinfect water, but one of the time-tested best approaches is chlorine. Chlorine compounds in the right proportion oxidize cell walls and destroy single-cell organism such as bacteria and protozoa. Chlorine even has a residual effect, working until the water reaches the homeowner’s tap.

Water from the sedimentation tanks enters the filter house. Here, it passes through a thick layer of clean sand and another of carbon powder. These remove the remaining particles. At any point the Environmental Protection Agency may demand tests for up to ninety different contaminants, according to a mandate set forth in the Clean Water Act of 1974.

Clean water must reach homes and businesses. In small towns a large pump often moves water to a tall storage tank, and gravity does the rest. In large cities where real estate is too expensive, electric or gas turbine powered pumps drive water through the pipes to the millions of spigots. To ensure this works properly, the municipal water supply station include sophisticated monitoring that permits operates to track water demand and supply and ensure the correct pumps and values operate to deliver what people need. The United States boasts one of the safest, cheapest, tastiest and most reliable networks for producing and delivering clean tap water in the world. But, as Dr. Malcolm said, life will find a way. Even the best systems sometimes let pathogens through, as happened in 1999 when a cryptosporidium outbreak left over fifty people dead. That fact may explain in part why millions are willing to spend billions on alternative sources of water.

At the Whole Foods Market Alton recalls the year 1979, the first year he remembers tasting a particular sort of bottled water from a particular foreign country. Despite the low cost of municipal water many people spend money for bottled. But this, Alton reveals, is not a new trend. History repeats itself...

At Cave Springs, George, Alton collects water dripping from a stalactite as he recalls superstitions of years gone by. Pliny the Elder believed underground water could make women conceive, could change a person’s voice, and could even turn black sheep white.

Alton, now in coat and top hat, recounts how in the eighteenth, nineteenth and even early into the twentieth century respected physicians sent patients to various spas to “take the waters” for many a malaise. “Doctor” Brown pauses to check the progress of a patient, ordering her to drink various quantities of water and bathe in particular pools and particular times, after which she may return home. The patient is effusively grateful. The “doctor” continues his perambulations as he explains that sometimes, these cures worked. Water rich in iron helped with “female troubles” and sulfur waters eased skin diseases. Carbonic waters mitigated the suffering of stomach pain and alkaline waters benefited gout patients. The “doctor” pauses to prescribe a visit to a particular Russian spa and a series of bathes there to help a patient with unremitting gout. Even when the water possessed no special additives, patients often improved because the general quality was much better than that found in cities of the time, before widespread sanitation. City wells were sometimes sited near open cesspools, an extremely risky geometry.

Bad water led to people who preferred beer. Made from boiled water and somewhat protected by hops, beer was far healthier than the water of the day. Soon enough, owners of health springs realized they could tap this market, and by 1880 bottled water from famous springs was available many places. But it was expensive, sometimes rivaling the cost of fine perfumes. Still, the middle class coughed up big bucks for healthy water and the bottled water industry boomed – especially for spring owners and the clever doctors who endorsed them, such as the man who hands “Doctor” Brown a nice chunk of change. But that was still small change compared to today’s profits.

Alton brings in the “men in black” from the FDA. They explain that while the EPA regulates tap water, bottled water falls under their jurisdiction. The law requires them to hold bottled water to the standards the EPA sets for tap water. State governments may set higher standards. And, they caution, while no incidents of food borne illness have been traced to bottled water, there is no reason to assume it is any safer than what comes from the tap.

They go on with some definitions: the label “spring water” designates liquid harvested from an underground aquifer from which water naturally flows to the surface at a specific location. The label “well water” designates water pumped from a hole drilled for the purpose. And “artesian well water” means that the source well is of the artesian sort, meaning it taps a deeper aquifer as Alton described earlier. “Naturally sparkling” water contains dissolved carbon dioxide that makes it bubbly, and any water with 250 ppm (parts per million) of dissolved solids is “mineral water.” Most European imports are mineral water, and the dissolved minerals give the water distinct flavors not always to the liking of Americans. Finally, Alton cautions buyers to look closely at the labels, because about thirty percent (30%) of bottled water comes from municipal sources - the manufacturer bottles tap water, perhaps with some filtration or flavoring added.

And that brings Alton to the subject of how water is packaged. Those plastic bottles are made of PET – polyethylene terepthalate, a stable, chemically inert and clear plastic. Hundreds of PET bottles (empty, thankfully) shower Alton from above, driving home his point that these bottles appear in landfills, parks, by the side of the road – all kinds of places. PET is entirely recyclable, and is a feedstock for carpet fibers and other applications. Versatile as they are, PET bottles cannot walk themselves to the recycling facility – meaning that users should do their part to ensure these bottles find their way to the recycler.


Share this article with your friends