Maybe it's not so bad if water has a taste, ASU professor says

For decades, there’s been intensive behind the scenes work that goes into making water taste — or maybe not taste — a certain way. Namely: neutral.

The work of treating water so that it “doesn’t taste like anything” means not only filtering out dangerous contaminants, but also removing odors and tastes that accompany the procedures associated with those treatments.

It's a delicate process, and water researchers often refer to this work as "sensory labor."

In her book, “The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrialized Beverage,” Arizona State University professor Christy Spackman chronicles the attempt in recent decades to make water drinkers take on some of that labor.

The idea is to encourage consumers to consider the notion that it's not necessarily a bad thing to think of water as something that has a taste — because it comes from somewhere. In the wine world, this is called "terroir" — the taste of place.

When The Show spoke with Spackman recently, she said that the goal ultimately is to transform the culture around what we drink. And water workers have actually started to borrow some tools from the wine world. She talked about about something called a flavor wheel, which totally changed the way consumers talk about wine.

Full conversation

CHRISTY SPACKMAN: Creating sensory expertise takes a lot of time. And so for a long time, the folks who had the most sensory expertise were people who were called connoisseurs. They'd spent a lot of time becoming really good at understanding one product or one like category of products and being able to describe them.

And with the rise of sensory science, you start getting this effort to essentially remove that expertise just from the single body of the connoisseur and see if you can distribute it amongst multiple people. And tools like [Ann C. Noble’s] Flavor Wheel will become a really important part of that.

Imagine essentially a wheel with three layers in it, and on the outside layer, there are gonna be a bunch of descriptive words, so maybe something like rubber band or orange blossom or strawberry. And as you move in, those, those really specific descriptors are going to become more categories, so something like citrus or floral.

And what this wheel does is it provides a visual shortcut to figuring out what is it you're smelling, ‘cause you can think about the fact, “Oh, I smelled this thing, but I'm searching for words to describe,” and if someone gives you a list of words, it gets a lot easier.

SAM DINGMAN: So, in reaction to all of this, there is now a commonly used wheel for tasting water. Can you give us an example of some of the characteristics that are on that wheel?

SPACKMAN: So, the one that's professionally used has characteristics that most of us — if it's for the raw water — most of us would, you know, prefer to never encounter, so maybe muddy or chemically sorts of characteristics.

But for the treated water, you might encounter something like the smell of a cucumber or citrus smells. In both cases, the cucumber and citrus, if you haven't added cucumber and citrus to your water, are something that indicate that, hey, there's actually something upstream that needs to be addressed. Because that's not a smell you're supposed to encounter.

DINGMAN: Am I correct that part of this movement towards trying to generate some language and normalize the idea of water having identifiable flavors was partly in response to the fact that because over the years we had developed this cultural preference for “flavorless water.” It was really fueling the expansion of and dependence on bottled water, which obviously has environmental implications.

SPACKMAN: Yeah. And I actually, Sam, so I'm going to suggest that it went the other way, that the bottled water industry created the cultural preference for a water that had minimal flavor and taste.

So I'm old enough to remember when drinking fountains were everywhere, and you would line up at school to get a drink from the drinking fountain. And the contrasting experience now is that through, especially the 1990s into the early 2000s, the water bottle came to symbolize hospitality in a way. That, you know, offering someone tap water was seen as this almost gauche thing to do. And, and the ideal thing to do would be to pull out a bottle of water. You know, you get this sort of standardization of what the taste of water should be.

DINGMAN: Yes. Well, one of the most wonderful sequences in the book, in my opinion, is when you talk about this campaign that was done in Paris in, I think the 2010s … Tell us what, what that was speaking again of, of wine and water.

SPACKMAN: So this is, I think, just a brilliant campaign that Paris' water system, Eau de Paris, put out. The term Grand Cru refers to the best of possible wines, and when they had this campaign, they had this image of essentially a tap with a corkscrew on top of it. Which was to say your water is of the same sort of quality as these amazing wines that we're producing here in this country. And so they did tastings in the street.

DINGMAN: They would do this in the summer, right, like when it was hot and they would just come, you know, you'd be walking down the street sweating and, and someone in a uniform would come up to you and say like, “Would you like a glass of water?”

SPACKMAN: Pretty much. I mean there was, there was a table set up with a tent and a big sign, but yeah ... You know, if you're coming into the train station, which was not, and currently still is not air conditioned, and you're there with thousands of people and it's 90 degrees out, a fresh glass of water is awfully attractive.

And so they really took advantage of the fact that one, Europe has not embraced air conditioning the same way we have. And two, just this opportunity to be where the people are and to use their own sensory capacities to start a conversation and to really invite people to rethink their own habits.

And there's been a pretty big change in the last 10 to 15 years. More people turning away from bottled water as the main thing that they're going to drink on a daily basis and instead embracing their tap water.

DINGMAN: Well, and this for me gets to what I think of as one of the big takeaways from the book, which is that neutralizing the natural taste of water has over the years — and I shouldn't say years, over the many decades — created this permission structure for industry actors who pollute water to keep polluting it.

We think to ourselves, well, the water should taste like nothing because we know that it is being actively polluted, so then those polluters can think to themselves, as long as there is a way to make the water taste like nothing, we can keep doing the things that make it taste like the stuff it shouldn't taste like.

SPACKMAN: Pretty much. This is really the tricky dance that our regulators are playing, that our, city councils are playing, our municipalities and state folks just to try and figure out what is it that is our responsibility. And also how can we regulate the folks who in some way alter the quality of our water before it then ends up back in the system?

DINGMAN: Well, but this also gets to this really lovely note that you end the book on, which is acknowledging that there is a lot of really complex work to be done amongst those constituencies you were just referring to. You at the end of the book also extend this invitation to water drinkers, like anybody listening to this right now.

SPACKMAN: I think the very first thing I'm asking or inviting people to do is to actually just pause and pay attention to their water as they drink it. And see if they can step away from saying, “I like this or I don't like this” into, “What am I experiencing, and how does that experience link me back to where this water came from?”

And it turns out most of us don't actually even really pause to do that most of the time. We're doing it unconsciously all the time. Like, is this safe? Is this not? By, by sniffing it to make certain it's not different than it was yesterday or the day before.

But when we pause and do that and also perhaps take the time to just briefly look at your water utility page and find out where the water is coming from. It then offers us an opportunity as parents or friends or children to take the people around us we love and maybe show them where our water's coming from. And talk about, “Hey, what's going on here?” And do I want those things that I'm seeing happening here to continue to happen.