I felt compelled to write a response after reading Rob Cohen’s wespeak on Tuesday. Particularly, I want to address a few points that Mr. Cohen brought up in his “loosely structured rant”. I’m not going to tackle his comments about society, as those issues are related to booze tangentially at best. Plus, I’ve got my own axe to grind. What particularly irked me was Mr. Cohen’s ignorance about alcohol and the history of alcoholic beverage consumption, even at the most basic level. His claim that alcohol was first embraced for self-destructive qualities “by our parents’ generation” could not be more untrue. Anyone with grandparents has heard stories of three-martini lunches in the 1940’s and 1950’s; that’s 12oz of gin and a splash of vermouth, even estimating modest 4oz size that was the standard in days of cocktail yore. 12oz is 8 shots, to be explicitly clear to my less-mathematically adept friends. Have you ever tried to have 8 shots with lunch and go to work, or to afternoon classes for that matter? I think my grandfather had a decent understanding for the intoxicating effects of ethanol. In fact, he can still out-drink me. But I digress….
It goes back further than our grandparents. Much further, to be precise. We’ll go all the way back, back to the dawn of production for alcoholic beverages, around 10,000 BC. Coincident with the rise of agriculture which brought about sweeter, lower-acid fruits than existed in the wild, the first wine (or mead) was an accident. The sugar-consuming yeasts that cause fermentation are widely present in nature, so any sweet liquid will eventually be turned to wine (or vinegar, depending on the yeast) if left around for a few weeks. Likely a jug of juice or honey was left out for a few days, and the yeast did the rest. The immediate benefits of the discovery were two-fold; like cheese, wine is partially spoiled but remains edible and protected against further spoilage, but unlike cheese, wine interferes with the normal operation of the nervous system. This preservative quality allowed for some storage or at very least a slightly longer “shelf life”. However, this is an insanely practical justification for the popularity of this genre of beverage for the next, oh, ten millennia or so. Our prehistoric ancestors were able to notice that they were getting tanked, too, and they liked it.
By the time of ancient Greece, wine was a staple beverage and part of the diet. They had a god dedicated to getting drunk and having parties, even. The Romans were able to advance the production methods enough to permit aging without spoilage, and Pliny devoted an entire book of his Natural History to the grape.
Beer and other beverages from fermented starches came about as soon as their longer-chain starches could be broken down into sugars that would ferment into alcohol. The code of Hammurabi in 1750 BC lists punishments for fraudulent beer sellers, so beer’s been around since at least then.
Distilled spirits are nothing new, either. Distillation was discovered by Arab and Persian alchemists as early as 500 BC, and was common in Europe even prior to the Renaissance. Every sort of distilled beverage has been consumed in mass quantities since at least the 17th century.
As for disparaging words about alcohol’s effect on society, those aren’t new either. Pliny was already well-aware of its potentially deleterious effects on society. In the book, he writes “There is no department of man’s life on which more labor is spent–as if nature had not given us the most healthy of beverages to drink, water…and so much toil and labor and expense is paid as the price of a thing that perverts men’s minds and produces madness, having caused the commission of thousands of crimes, and being so attractive that a large part of mankind knows of nothing else worth living for.” Times don’t change, do they?
So, don’t feel special because you were on the Beirut table for six consecutive rounds, or you downed fifteen shots of Jaeger last Friday. Have some respect for the rich history you’re furthering when you put the bottle to your lips. Don’t confuse your drinking with alcoholism, a much more serious disease. And if you’re going to walk around campus and drink, don’t throw your empties on the ground. That’s just disrespectful. Put them in a trash can. Or in the recycling, if that’s your thing.
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