Because when the we were arriving here, the we actually refused to drink from streams and eat fish from rivers and ponds. They starved. They starved they did, waiting for the natives to bring them turkeys because they refused to eat fish from rivers that were teeming with fish. And they did this because back in England and the rest of Europe the water was so polluted the fish didn't even live in them. Do you understand just a few years ago it was big news in Britain that they actually found an eel, and eel in the Thames River? An eel. An eel. The Thames used to be so polluted that not even eels could live in it. Eels. Eels. Not a single fish. Not even eels. Eels.
The settlers' drink of choice was beer and cider. Hard cider. Johnny Appleseed? He wasn't just some guy who had a thing for apples, he was a businessman seeding the countryside with apples which he would make a deal with landowners that he would get a percentage of the apples when they started producing and this was to make cider out of them, because that's what everybody drank.
Americans back then were actually perpetually buzzed because all they drank was hard cider and ale. The water was clean throughout America, but they literally believed that fresh water was poisonous. That's why bathing used to be a foreign concept not practiced in Europe.
Water filtration? Skip the Greeks, that's a 20th Century thing here. 20th century thing here. And it didn't reach the South till FDR started putting it there during the Depression. And it didn't hit Europe till after World War II when Truman took it upon himself to domesticate them. To domesticate them. To domesticate them. Europe. To domesticate them. Water filtration. After World War II. Truman. Domesticated them.