Review: Brian Fagan on the Taste and Ecology of Water

“Does it taste good? Does it taste like water?,” a Baltimore reporter asked cheekily while observing a 1960 effort in Paris to monitor drinking water quality. The French lifestyle magazine L’Express a decade later raised an eyebrow at water tasters who, Christy Spackman tells us in a new book, The Taste of Water, were “sacrificing the ordinary hedonisti…