|
March 27,2008
Home Sipping?
In today's New York Times, Eric Asimov has an article discussing introducing adolescents to alcohol in a family setting. His children are sixteen and seventeen and he is contemplating giving them sips of wine with dinner. He only discusses wine although many people drink beer with meals and the alcoholic content of a beer, a glass of wine, and a serving of whiskey in a cocktail is the same.
Asimov reviews some of the debate over the wisdom of allowing young people under the age of twenty-one to drink and discusses, to a limited extent, European models of family and adolescent drinking. The personal decision Asimov and his wife are contemplating is a small example of an long standing debate in the field of alcohol studies.
Temperance and prohibition advocates in the nineteenth and early twentieth century were adamantly opposed to young people drinking and they developed Scientific Temperance, a curriculum designed to educate students about the physiological dangers of drinking. The lessons often included a demonstration of a shriveled liver. For prohibitionists drinking and alcohol abuse were societal problems which required a societal response. In this world view there was no room for individual choice or decision about when and where it was appropriate to drink.
Following Repeal, the liquor industry worked hard to reestablish liquor as an appropriate beverage and reintegrate drinking in family life. The medical and scientific community helped brewers and distillers in this endeavor by reformulating problem drinking and alcohol abuse as a medical and individual problem.
Brewers,both before and after Prohibition, saw beer as the beverage of moderation which could be enjoyed through out society. German immigrants enjoyed drinking in a family setting, the beer garden. The beer garden represented brewers highest ambitions for the place of beer in American society. However the saloon, a less wholesome public place for drinking, predominated in the years prior to Prohibition.
Although the alcohol studies field has been successful in defining alcoholism as a individual disease, since the 1970's an alternative formulation, in many ways closer to the views of prohibitionists, has emerged. Because of societal problems such as drunk driving, cirrhosis, and fetal alcohol syndrome, neo-temperance advocates have argued for societal responses to these problems. The raising of the minimum drinking age in 1984, warning labels on alcoholic beverages, and ongoing battles to restrict television advertising of beer and distilled spirits are examples.
It is this social and cultural context that is missing from Asimov's discussion of his personal decision about introducing his children to alcohol. Although he does reference the issue of drinking and driving, he seems to assume that the only influence on young people choices around drinking will be that of family. Beer, in particular, is so integrated into our society on so many different levels that its cultural influence on young people must be accounted for.
Acknowledging the cultural influence of beer doesn't not mean that an individual family which enjoys drinking in a moderate way, whether it be wine,beer, or a cocktail, can not convey those responsible habits to the children. It would be naive however to accept that this "normalizing" of alcohol will alone provide "significant" protection against dangers of young adulthood such as binge drinking or ritual drinking around the life cycle event of reaching the age of twenty-one.
|
 |
| Sex Sells |
|
| This image is from a power point presentation of the Iowa Alcoholic Beverages Division entitled "Alcohol Marketing 2005." "Sex Sells was their title for the advertisement. This Coors Light ad is just one example, perhaps a provocative one, of some of the other influences on young people facing choices about drinking. http://www.iowaabd.com/
|
March 22, 2008
The Drinking Age
On March 18, allaboutbeer.com had the following news item on its website:
"The legal drinking age in the U.S. has been 21 years of age for over two decades, but that may change if lawmakers in several states have their way. In the Green Mountain state of Vermont, a committee of the State Senate has approved a bill that will allow a task force to consider the issue and make a recommendation to the Legislature on whether or not to lower the drinking age from 21 to 18. Some of the arguments in favor of lowering the drinking age are that 18 to 20 year-olds are allowed to die for their country in a war, but are not allowed to drink. It's also argued that the higher drinking age hasn't kept young people from consuming alcohol and has instead driven underage consumption underground, particularly on college campuses."
It is interesting that the Vermont legislators are linking the country's participation in the Iraq War to the drinking age. In the 1970's officials emphasized this same connection - between the Vietnam War and the drinking age. Initially the perceived maturity of the soldiers led to the lowering of both the voting age and the drinking age. Fatalities from car accidents ultimately led to the re-raising of the drinking age.
Over the past five years many people have remarked on the differences in public responses to the two wars. The relatively low level of activism against the Iraq War, particularly among young people, has been striking. Most commentators agree that the fact that there is no draft and participation in the military and the war is "voluntary" has been the critical difference. Apparently five years of was has generated a high enough level of casualties to prompt Vermont legislators to question the fairness of our involvement in Iraq.
If Vermont proceeds with this attempt to lower the drinking age, the big question will be how the federal government, the neo-temperance movement, and the liquor industry respond. The Federal Uniform Age Act of 1984 made the drinking age of twenty-one mandatory by withholding highway funds if the states did not comply. Will the federal government find some way to "punish" Vermont and other states for lowering the drinking age. Over the past few years attempts to curtail drunken driving have stalled but state legislation to lower the drinking age would certainly galvanize the movement.
Although some prominent members of the brewing industry, including August A. Busch III, have called for the drinking age to be lowered, most people in the liquor industry have a neutral position on this topic. Although the brewers are a long way from their post-Repeal moderation in advertising, they will probably continue to take no position on the drinking age.
When I was writing Brewing Battles, I found it fascinating that many of the arguments and controversies that the brewing industry faced in the late twentieth century were essentially new versions of battles from the nineteenth century. Now in the twentieth-first century battles from the late twentieth are re-emerging.
|
This public service ad is from a 2005 alcohol awareness campaign by the Michigan Beer & Wine Wholesalers Association and the Office of Highway Safety planning. Members of the brewing industry have historically promoted safe driving while maintaining problem drinking that can result in drunk driving is a individual problem.
|
 |
| Drunk Driving, courtesy of mwwba.org |
|
|
|
March 17, 2008
This is an essay I wrote in 2005 shortly after my family and I visited Hong Kong and mainland China.
Chinese Drinking
My family and I recently returned from visiting Hong Kong and mainland China. My husband is the vice president of a private undergraduate liberal arts college and the purpose of our trip was to visit several Chinese educational institutions. Because of this, the very nice, friendly, and generous Chinese people we met treated us as celebrities or in their context, dignitaries. The main consequences of this treatment were many banquets held in our honor.
I have not attended that many banquets in the United States but the few I have been at have begun with a cocktail hour then proceeded to a multi course meal with dessert and wine. Chinese banquets are completely different from this. The meal always takes place in a private room around a round table. At each place setting there are three glasses; a water glass, a wine glass, and a very small shot glass, probably one-half ounce in capacity. At the beginning of the meal, the host will ask the honored guest, my husband in our case, if they want "spirits".
At our first banquet this request elicited amused responses from the other Chinese guests as well as some good natured warnings about the potent "firepower" of the spirits. The Chinese woman sitting next to me who spoke English stated the spirits "were not for women." Although this surprised me, I wished to be polite and therefore refrained.
When my husband said he would try it, his water glass -probably about eight ounces-was filled with a 50 percent alcohol, clear, viscous liquid. This alcoholic beverage was baijiu, which is distilled from sorghum.All the guests drinking also had their glasses filled. As the meal proceeded the host toasted my husband, pouring from his big glass into the small shot glass, raising it high, downing it while saying Gam Bei (Bottoms Up!) and then showing the empty glass to my husband. At that first banquet there must have been at least ten toasts. Many of the guests completely emptied their large glasses and then received refills. The whole event had a competitive and masculine tone with the goal being to see who can drink the most.
All of our subsequent banquets followed this pattern. Some did not involve spirits so the drinking was much more subdued. At different banquets, various participants had a greater or lesser affinity for alcohol and the total amount of alcohol consumed varied. Women did participate although not as vociferously as the men. Some participants filled their large glasses with water and then proceeded to participate in the social aspects of the toasting ritual without running the risk of inebriation.
As a historian who has written about alcohol and the industry and has attended over twenty-five years of conferences on the general subject, the heavy drinking I observed in China came as a complete surprise. The global studies of alcohol and drugs have always focused on opium and tea as China?s chosen psychoactive substances. There is also a literature that seems to suggest that, because Chinese drinking takes place during meals, it is more moderate.
Alcohol experts define binge drinking as the consumption of five or more drinks at one time. In the United States and increasingly internationally, it is college age people who most often indulge in this behavior. Binge drinking on college campuses has led to an increase in death from alcohol poisoning and is the subject of many research projects.
At the Chinese banquets I attended many of the men present had at least eight drinks. Binge drinking in America often has a ritualistic aspect; newly "legal" drinkers in the Southwest spend their first night as a twenty-one year old seeing how much alcohol they can consume. The showing of empty glasses and the good natured urging to continue drinking at Chinese banquets is the same kind of behavior. There is obviously a whole aspect of Chinese consumption of psychoactive substances that remains unexplored.
When I was thinking about posting the above, a front page article in the New York Times appeared. Entitled, "Got a Mint, Comrade? China Cracks Down on Liquid Lunch," the article discussed the Chines practice of lunchtime banquets where alcohol, usually baijiu, plays a large role. The Chinese government usually foots the bill for these alcohol-laden meals and thus wants to curtail the amount of drinking.
The article also indicates that consumption of baijiu has declined as a more prosperous, younger generation has begun to drink other spirits, wine, and beer. Around the same time the Times covered this story we entertained visiting Chinese scholars in our home. They all declared that they thing they missed most from home was baijiu. The drinking habits of China, both historically and in the ever changing global market, call out for further exploration and research.
|
 |
| Brewing Battles Book Party |
|
| 03/2/08
The Brewing Battles book party was on Feb. 27th and it was a great success. The food was good as was the beer; my talk on Schlitz and Pabst went well. There are a couple of pictures from the event. One question a lot of people asked was how did I arrive at this topic for a book?
My dissertation was on the American liquor industry and the federal government from 1862 to around 1915. My interest in the topic developed when I discovered that the liquor industry, along with tobacco, contributed over fifty percent of the federal government's internal revenue from the Civil War to the institution of the income tax in 1913.
Although I later decided to change careers and become a nurse I did not lose my interest in history in general and specifically the topic of my Ph.D. studies. After a few years I began to think about how the beer industry was well suited for a comprehensive examination of its growth and development. When I began to look at brewing from Repeal on, I found many of the same issues and concerns that had existed in the earlier period. Even today brewers, large and small, must confront the federal government and taxation as they conduct their business.
|
 |
| Amy reading from Brewing Battles |
|
|
02/23/08
Two things happened while I was revising my manuscript that I want to comment on. Coors and Miller are merging. If this goes through, two companies - Anheuser-Busch and the new Coors-Molson-Miller will control almost eighty percent of the beer market. Will the federal government, fearing anti-trust implications, prevent the merger? To some extent such an action would be closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. The other big question about the potential combination of the number two and number three American brewers is what impact will it have on the rest of the domestic market and the growing global market?
The other thing that happened was that Maureen Ogle published a book with a similar subtitle as mine, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer (Harcourt, 2006). Not wanting to make my book a dialogue with hers, I didn’t look at it until I completed my own. Readers of both works, including David Fahey, have indicated that the two books are very different. Mine, based on thirty years of scholarship, emphasizes the relationship between the brewers and the Federal Government. The field of alcohol and temperance history is so vast that there are many, many volumes that could be written on various topics. There is certainly room in the field for Stanley Baron, (Brewed in America - the best title in my opinion), Amy Mittelman, and Maureen Ogle.
Keep checking for future postings. I’ll try to write something once a week.
|
That was my very first post. If you want to read new posts click here to go to Musings my blog.
|
|
|
