Even though we apparently now know that no alcohol is "good" for health, and almost any amount more than the occasional is bad for it, is there any room left to think about psychological and social goods? Clearly excess drinking does our psychology no favors, and genetic, environmental or other circumstances may curse alcohol use for many, often from the start. For those who abstain for various reasons (including health), sobriety can be crucial, and for those with an alcoholic dependency, all-important. But to vilify almost all drinking as fundamentally unhealthy -- probably little fairer than what was done to marijuana in the last century -- ignores the deeply rooted up sides, eg, that social drinking is often very much a part of .. societies, not least in its cultural weight on everything from cordials to religious observance to hospitality to toasting etc. (It is stupid in any context of social censure -- see the recent Economist piece -- to say that nondrinkers socially "free ride" on drinkers, but we can all agree that alcohol at gatherings is doing social work, regardless of who partakes or doesn’t, as long as some do.)
And then, given how moderate amounts can, sometimes, help us relax, laugh, think, meditate (and generally more gently than hallucinogens which often have hit or miss outcomes), even sometimes get work done better ..
And of course alcohol enhances the smell and taste of food (mostly wine + beer, as spirit tends to numb the sense of taste, thus typically drunk before and after meals), and it tastes uniquely engaging in itself (all the special phenols in wine, the burn and prized smoothness of liquor, etc) .. the history of the association of wine and food is too massive to contemplate at once (even if this association is also too bloated and commercialized in the culture of the moment). And the history of cooking with wine and spirits, and with beer too, forget it. Then, too, alcohol is varyingly valued between cultures to mark the progress of a more formal meal in a sort of parallel coursing -- to take a European example, cocktails or toasts before, wine with the mains, brandy etc afterward, and so on. And then there is the entire heritage of the agricultural and distillation/fermentation techniques, terroire, and so on.
Even if no alcohol is "healthy," is some alcohol worth it, in moderation? Even if that moderation can be terribly delicate? Athletes shorten the life of their joints in their pursuits ... the more intense pleasures, however different from one another, often have prices, and many will buy.
Since the current commentary often focuses on longevity, are we sure we want to live even ten extra years without a bit of booze (and sugar) if at all possible, and age itself surely increases the likelihood of some of the conditions threatened by alcohol use anyway? Individual outcomes via genetics etc are endlessly different, but our grandparents and their parents, what are we supposed to say when we see many of those drinkers having lived reasonably well beyond ninety? "We'll never be that lucky?” And in a time with far more medical resources and overall better diets?
(Speaking of improved diets, while nonalcoholic offering in spirits and wine still seem to miss the mark, nonalcoholic beer has a new lease on life. Besides its obvious good to people abstaining from alcohol, it's also something one can add into a diet that includes alcohol -- rather than two alcoholic beers with dinner, say, one can have a single beer and then an NA beer, and feel less slowed down. Drinking NA beer for a while can also increase savor when one next drinks full alcohol beer.)
Socially, where viable, alcohol can be about relaxing and hopefully having a better time somewhere that you actually want to be, and if others are drinking, maybe it's also about having that token thing in common. Is it the most wholesome thing to have in common? No, but it's ancient and meaningful, recognizable in a time where increasingly we are not sure who is around us. And romantically it's still a classic for many. (Though in regard to inebriation and consent, things have certainly shifted, especially in hard-drinking contexts like college, and this shift has its own benefits and problems.)
We sometimes know people who do not really start to drink until later in life, trying to catch up on the ability to manage the drug that their earlier-adopter peers may have accreted - the result can be abuse, but also or instead a game of social catch-up, a lasting deficit.
As a friend suggests, it makes a difference to start young. We grew up in my grandparents' summer house, where cork coasters soaked in whiskey were permanently how the house smelled, where "cocktail hour" was as real and consistent as a tea in rural and suburban Britain or küchen in Germany; for us as kids, it meant strangely unlimited cheese and crackers and ginger ale. When we were old enough to add in the truly central ingredient in many new venues, the stage was all set, cognitively. At their winter home, balancing the small rough wood countertop and shelves of their summer bar, my grandparents had a marine varnished bar, oil paintings and tables in their own room (not in a basement!), with all the glass and fixings and atmosphere and even a speed rack -- when we were kids, we got to pretend to make each other drinks, tell jokes we didn't really get, play with the most elegant decks of cards we could pull out of cabinets, and mess with the mechanical draw poker machine, betting poker chips on it all - and then we'd see the adults do the same, plus alcohol. And it could be fun, a joke -- my grandmother use to buy highly unspectacular Canadian Club whiskey in the warm season, and tell people tongue in cheek that it was her "summer whiskey" - I do not know what her winter whiskey was (and it's hard to refuse the tradition of true winter [hot] whiskey, that last vestige of spirit used as a restorative from cold). Fewer cocktail drinkers these days may speak of "my drink," but most, even in this era of endless options, will still have a simple favorite and guard it as an important preference.
(It was at the summer house that I had probably my first try at bartending for adults, which I would do somewhat later in London and elsewhere -- it came when I was still quite young, and a grownup relative agreed to let me get them "a whiskey." I poured about four fingers of it straight as if it were apple juice, some occult variety of which I probably still largely considered that it was. [James Herriot in one of his books describes adult Yorkshire farmers' handling of the spirit as similarly "wonderfully untutored."] My relative naturally thought that the glass I brought them had soda or water added; as it did not, they choked on the first sip and then explained the issue, and that was probably when I first realized that for the most part, spirits needed to be diluted and, more importantly, that this was fundamentally what a cocktail was. At that age, it was a puzzle to me why anyone should want to dilute a desirable flavor of anything, but I could see the necessity of it with liquor if my career were to continue. Mixers there at my grandmother's in summer rarely extended past little bottles of club soda and tonic; at her winter home, by contrast, a small amount of searching behind sliding cabinet doors would reveal a gothic selection of mixers and liqueurs, often quite ancient. Many years later in that bar, at a gathering following my grandmother's funeral service, I found a fairly typical offering, a bottle of armagnac with cherries in it. It's said that out-of-control French gourmets still drown a songbird, the ortolan, in armagnac before baking it in a casserole in defiance of French wildlife conservation law; this bottle of armagnac had drowned a fistful of cherries, and over the fifty or more years that the poor cherries had probably been there, their skins had ruptured, and they now expressed themselves as gently waving, grayish anemones floating in a small ocean of golden indulgence, from which they slopped ill-humoredly into the snifters when I opened the bottle to serve a bit to everyone there -- likely the last time those snifters were used by our family. Luckily, no one became ill, no more than I did in 2022 when I tried a 25-year-old Bud Light that had been unearthed from a college time capsule - like the armagnac, it was not good, yet also like the armagnac, neither had it changed much, which certainly is also part of alcohol's charm: within limits, it's fairly constant, and -- as most extremely when archeologists talk about opening 2,000-year-old vials of wine recovered from sunken Phoenician ships, or when a rare WWII vintage is found in someone's cellar -- even a bit eternal.)
That was the generation, the economic stratum, the region, the country, their personalities -- and since I am very lucky in not being highly prone to serious overconsumption, I've often been able to enjoy so much of booze culture, from college to employment in New York's restaurant and hospitality culture,** to the UK to Asia to other traditions, to the fun of trying to invent stuff at home.*** Millennials may have been having their struggles, but they have had their "mixology" and brewing revival (though the latter, sadly overburdened by dry IPA’s with late-in-process hops, is often a disappointment, with flavoring too often needed to decorate brews other than an IPA).
Certainly, seeing adult drinking early in life spread across our families and friends, we also saw overconsumption and misbehavior -- not constantly, but enough to be made a bit more cautious in later life. (Needless to say, it doesn't take that much of a shift for this to cut entirely the other way, when pervasive family/genetically prone or community overconsumption results in learned behavior and alcoholism in the next generation.)
And the obvious influence of real-life peers aside, it even gets down to entertainment. When I watch certain shows that feature whiskey culture, it’s fun to have a whiskey, in the same way that I always wish I had spaghetti when The Godfather is on (or coffee during any cop show). Cognitively, I feel good doing what those characters do, as surely as a kid with a ginger ale sitting next to his aunt or uncle. (These sorts of associations, of course, matter far more than beverage advertising, which, as shows like Mad Men pointed out, is often meant to evoke such scenes anyway.)
Complete sobriety (and its counterpart, California sobriety) are marketable to Gen Z, a generation critically warned off some kinds of pleasure, and at a much-discussed cost in social isolation. In compensation, Gen Z has been given dispensaries full of legal, amped up weed products -- overuse of which carries some rather alcohol-like risks, though the addictive potential still seems less. (Traffic enforcement is coming ...)
Basically, abstaining from alcohol for any number of reasons can be essential -- but abstaining for general longevity and health simply deserves, as in any other context, to be weighed with other factors - recent media coverage of science’s newer understandings of alcohol simply seems to regard drink as socially disposable for all but the problem drinker, a dismissal we’ve never given even to tobacco cigarettes. (Tobacco, too, has a culture that we are largely abandoning, though of course the health effects of habitual tobacco use seem worse by far than those of long-term alcohol use. Indeed, of today's stronger marijuana, we might ask whether it's falling victim to the same trend as tobacco did, an increase in the drug content and the ease of its delivery; this happens in a surprisingly unregulated way in dispensaries, and marijuana on the street, trying to keep pace, is increasingly laced with substances that can debilitate and kill. Interestingly, dispensary weed is sometimes marketed with the vibes of a swiftly bygone stoner culture; it is hard to imagine alcohol being marketed with such nostalgia for excess consumption.)
We used to talk conventionally about a good life over a long life. I think that now we are in a phase where we have lost the thread of good life, and so once again are striving for long life, with the help of minimal alcohol and sugar. I guess that's a way of hoping, too -- that if you live long enough, you might feel good. But it's also a way of forgetting, not that alcohol and sugar made us happy, but that they sometimes, with luck, taught us things about happiness.
**I say nothing else here about experience with wine, but one night after finishing a late shift waiting tables at a Venetian restaurant predictably big on northern Italian wines, we went over to Smith & Wollensky, then still a spot in Manhattan, and bailed out a public figure sitting at the next table who owed the waiters a certain amount. In return, they shared their bottle of an "old vines" zinfandel that had a peppermint whiff I've never forgotten.
***While the ingredients are not given here, I am, presentation wise, proud of taking jagged icicles out of the edges of an ice cube tray to create the "Fortress of Solitude" cocktail.
