Do we know what real water tastes like?

I was driving to court in the lemon yellow sun of the morning, with my friend Van Morrison playing on the stereo; he confided in me that he wanted a new life, a better one, where he would jump hedges and drink "clear clean water" to quench his thirst ("Astral Weeks", 1968). Idling at a red light, I thought about that metaphor. What's so special about water? Why not wine, why not cold milk, why not something more exciting for Van the Man? The thought swirled through my mind, once, twice, before a realisation crept in - a majority of us, urban people, have never tasted real water.

If you live in a city, your tap water probably comes from a municipal supply where it is pumped with chlorine and other chemicals. That stays true even if you drink from a water purifier, which kills germs with reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light. Or, you drink bottled water (simple) or mineral water (fancy). All of these are H2O with chemicals added and contaminants removed, to cleanse, to purify, to make it possible for one to have faith in water. The poor who have no access to clean water drink the worst kind of polluted water from rivers which are indistinguishable from sewers, full of industrial and organic waste.

I would go further and suggest that unless you have been on a farm with a well, or in a place reasonably distant from a town, you have not actually drunk natural water, but some approximation of it. Real water comes from the Earth, from aquifers, from rivers which come from glaciers, from rain. It's not just two H's jacked into an O.

I do not mean to be perverse. Water borne diseases are a major cause of death in a developing country like ours. One of the biggest triumphs in modern history is urban sanitation and the promise of clean drinkable water. Treatment is the only way that it is possible for human beings to live in such immense population densities and not be ravaged by epidemic disease. Since John Snow first plotted cholera on a map, we have come a long way in public health - you can now at least trust the water. So what's the sequitur? Why am I pointing this out? I think it says something important about where we are as a species. When we speak about our "original" cultures, of our traditions and deracination - it's worth stepping back and considering that we don't even drink real water. All of humanity's great literature, our myths, our religious texts, are absolutely soaked in water.

Slowly but surely we are moving away from our ancestral roots, we are becoming post-human. We don't breathe the same kind of air, we don't see sunlight for large parts of the day, we walk very little, we eat processed food - our relationship with nature, with our physical heritage, is very heavily mediated. We've traded these things for a number of the benefits of modern urban civilisation, which are too many to mention, from jazz to MasterChef.

I would only hope to be more mindful of the changes we are undergoing, and maybe that wisdom could make us more tolerant and more conscious of our choices. In the same way as author David Foster Wallace asked us to care about the world around us and the way it is - "This is water" - I would suggest that we take some time to recognise what it is not.

Once in a while, I spend some time walking in the mountains. When I come across running water at a certain altitude, and am reasonably certain there's no settlement upstream, I've learnt that it's generally safe to drink. I bend down and cup my hands, and fill them from the top of the stream. That's water. It tastes like a life worth living.