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 [log in to unmask] Learn more about The World's Premier Culinary College at www.ciachef.edu A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List sponsored by the Society of American Archivists, www.archivists.org. For the terms of participation, please refer to http://www.archivists.org/listservs/arch_listserv_terms.asp. To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] In body of message: SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname *or*: UNSUB ARCHIVES To post a message, send e-mail to [log in to unmask] Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html Problems? Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>