Available From UC Press

Have you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from. Through examining the development of sensory expertise in the United States and France, this unique history uncovers the foundational role of palatability in shaping Western water treatment processes. By focusing on the relationship between taste and the environment, Christy Spackman shows how efforts to erase unwanted tastes and smells have transformed water into a highly industrialized food product divorced from its origins. The Taste of Water invites readers to question their own assumptions about what water does and should naturally taste like while exposing them to the invisible—but substantial—sensory labor involved in creating tap water.

Christy Spackman is Assistant Professor of Art/Science at Arizona State University and Director of the Sensory Labor(atory), an experimental research collective dedicated to creatively disrupting longstanding sensory hierarchies.
 

"Food studies scholar Christy Spackman proves that, yes, an entire book—and a riveting one at that—can be devoted to how water tastes, turning into a bland commodity, and selling its non-taste at exorbitant cost. After reading this book, I now view tasting water as just the same as tasting food, and so will you."—Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, New York University, and author of Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics

"This book provides a unique history of municipal water infrastructure that brings sensory and quality issues, rather than just potability, into central focus. Spackman develops a theory of industrial terroir that beautifully captures the locations and practices of universality, and simultaneously pulls our attention to the place, aesthetics, and political economy of purified and cleansed waters. This concept is useful well beyond this study."—Saul Halfon, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society, Virginia Tech 

"Spackman has produced a meticulous, creative, and even playful history of the production of water with an 'industrial terroir,' which is water from 'nowhere' with no distinguishing tastes or smells.  The work gracefully moves across the history of water and standardization technologies, leading us from early twentieth-century psychophysics and the 'objective' study of flavor and sensation to twenty-first-century issues of water futures. This compelling read exemplifies the best of science and technology studies insights."—Jennifer Croissant, Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Graduate Faculty in Sociology, University of Arizona  

"How does your tap water taste? Should it taste that way? Upon reading this book, you will not only answer these questions but also rethink your relationship with drinking water and understand the tremendous amount of hidden work that has created tap water."—Melanie Kiechle, author of Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America 

"The Taste of Water is a formidable account of how industrial techniques extract not only value, but also molecules, smells, and colors. Taking the body as sensory intersection, Spackman puts pressure on our innermost and fleshiest forms of perception. This book removes ideologies of purity and challenges historical erasures; it reaches into your tastebuds and turns them into places and sites of history. Read this wonderful book before you next open the tap!"—Andrea Ballestero, author of A Future History of Water

"The Taste of Water is a provocative, important, even crucial inquiry into a topic too easily ignored, yet necessary to our survival as a species. Spackman adroitly navigates the complex sensory qualities of water while she reveals the work of engineers, policy makers, and others to provide potable water to communities—past, present, and future. A compelling exploration of the power of the senses, industrial terroir, and built environments in our everyday lives."—Amy B. Trubek, author of The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir 

"An eye-opening—or perhaps one should say taste-bud-opening—study of how water is made to taste like water, and of how consumers’ tastes in water have been shaped by the development of new techniques, instruments, and forms of expertise over the past century. Anyone interested in the histories and possible futures of food science, water engineering, and the senses will find much to savor in The Taste of Water." – Etienne Benson, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science