Our college was closed for three weeks in July. I'm slowly catching up
on the accumulated e-mails, and saw the discussion of distilled water
that was included in a post about charred materials.
My mother was a chemistry major in college, and at least one professor
told her that if people drank only distilled water, it would eventually
kill them.
When I was five years old, my father took a job with an oil company in
the Middle East (coincidentally, the same oil company that Peter K.
mentioned in his recent post about movies having to be edited before the
country would allow them to be shown there). The town we lived in was on
the coast, and we had two water systems in our houses: "hard water,"
with a very high mineral content, available in the bathrooms and
kitchens for washing, etc., and "sweet water," which was basically
distilled water,in the kitchen only, for drinking and cooking. My mother
panicked when she heard this, because she thought it would kill us, but
I grew up drinking distilled water, and am none the worse for it. I
think the company may have added some fluoride to it, because most
communities do add fluoride to drinking water. I still love the taste of
distilled water, which really does have a "sweet" taste, and sometimes
drink some of the distilled water we buy for our humidifier; I'm very
sensitive to tastes and smells of tap water.
Actually, it's not just distilled water that's a strong solvent; *all*
water is a solvent. I did a quick search on the Internet and found
several items that described water (in general) as "the universal
solvent" because so many things dissolve in it.
Christine
Christine Crawford-Oppenheimer
Information Services Librarian
Conrad N. Hilton Library:
http://www.ciachef.edu/admissions/about/library.asp
The Culinary Institute of America
1946 Campus Drive
Hyde Park, NY 12538
(845) 451-1322
fax (845) 451-1092
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Learn more about The World's Premier Culinary College
at www.ciachef.edu
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