Posts Tagged ‘alcohol’
“Alcohol may be man’s worst enemy, but the Bible says love your enemy”*…
It turns out, Andrew Coletti reports, that alcohol is consumed widely in nature– and may have played a role in human evolution…
… There’s something charmingly funny about the image of an animal drinking alcohol; it seems so incongruously humanlike. Some documentaries that show wild animals getting drunk off boozy rotten fruit, like this one from Botswana, use music and narration to emphasize the unexpected comedy of the scene. Scientists once believed that such behavior was random and accidental, especially in species not closely related to humans and other great apes. But more recent studies paint a very different picture. A research review published in October 2024 in Trends in Ecology & Evolution found that wherever ethanol—the active ingredient in alcoholic beverages—occurs in nature, it is routinely consumed by a variety of species, from insects and birds to rodents and monkeys.
In nature, “ethanol ingestion is far more common than was previously thought,” says Anna Bowland, a Ph.D. student in bioscience at the University of Exeter, England, who worked on the review. The paper cites research mainly from tropical regions like Central America and Southeast Asia, where yeast and bacteria ferment the natural sugars in fruit and nectar into ethanol in the hot sun. But a similar effect has also been observed in completely different environments. In Finland, when wild berries thaw in the warm sun after being bruised by frost, “they ferment quite quickly,” says Bowland. “And then as the birds come and feed on them, they’re ingesting alcohol.”
Because animals that feed on fruit and nectar ingest more ethanol on average, many of them show evolutionary adaptations to tolerate it. The review cites a study from the rainforests of Malaysia, which found that arboreal mammals like treeshrews, lorises, and squirrels regularly feed on fermented palm nectar with an alcohol concentration as high as 3.8 percent, comparable to a light beer. But intriguingly, says Bowland, “they don’t—in our anthropogenic sense—seem to get drunk,” meaning that they don’t display behaviors associated with inebriation in humans, like drowsiness or reduced motor skills. This suggests that treeshrews are particularly good at metabolizing ethanol.
Bowland explains that from an evolutionary standpoint, “it’s not beneficial for [animals] to get drunk, because that can lead to predation and injury and reduce survival, so they might not pass on their genes.” Animals that feed on a boozy food source have a better chance of survival if they can hold their liquor, so the presence of ethanol creates evolutionary pressure for tolerance….
… Another prominent example is the great apes. “Humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas—we all possess a mutation in one of our genes that greatly increases the rate at which we can metabolize and break down ethanol,” says Bowland, thanks to a digestive enzyme called ADH4. While other primates like Central American spider monkeys consume ethanol in fruit, and may, like fruit flies, be drawn to the smell, apes are particularly efficient at processing it. This has led some researchers to propose that the human fondness for ethanol goes back long before deliberate brewing and fermenting, to a dietary shift in our common ancestor with other apes.
Robert Dudley, a professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, explored the evolutionary origins of human alcohol consumption in his book The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis. “Primates are ancestrally fruit-eaters, going back 45 million years,” says Dudley, based on evidence like the shape of their teeth. In modern apes, fruit still makes up 60 to 80 percent of the diet for chimpanzees and 90 percent for gibbons. According to Dudley, who was not affiliated with the 2024 study, genetic analysis of ADH4 in early apes shows that the enzyme became 20 times better at degrading ethanol about 12 million years ago. “This is right when the great apes are coming out of the trees and going bipedal, walking around, and, we think, now going after more ripe fruit crops that have already fallen down,” he says. Other foods becoming scarce, as well as the increased availability of fermenting fruit on the ground, may have increased pressure for prehistoric primates to adapt to an ethanol-rich source of nutrients.
“We’ve evolved with this molecule,” Dudley says of ethanol. His research suggests that the scent of ethanol “acts as a long-distance sensory cue” for primates, alerting them to the presence of edible fruit hidden among dense foliage. “Where there’s ethanol, there has to be sugar,” Dudley explains, and the scent of ethanol might even allow monkeys and apes to “assess individual fruits without wasting time biting into them.” Dudley also suggests that ethanol-rich fruit may stimulate the appetite of wild primates, encouraging them to take as much advantage of the available nutrition as possible. He compares this with the “aperitif effect” observed in humans, where consuming alcohol before a meal leads to increased food consumption, perhaps due to the stimulation of brain areas that regulate feeding behavior…
… Bowland is hopeful that her review will encourage further research into the interactions between animals and ethanol. Dudley agrees. “I think that the nice thing about that paper [is it] just points out the ubiquity of ethanol,” he says of the 2024 review. Ethanol is just a part of nature, found wherever there is sugar and microbes to ferment it. And while there’s still much to be explored, one thing is clear: If there’s anything that truly separates human beings from animals, it’s not alcohol…
No “dry January” in much of the animal kindom: “The Booze-Soaked Lives of Wild Animals,” from @aoofficial.bsky.social.
Apposite (or many better said, subsequent): “Peeing is contagious in chimpanzees, study suggests.”
* Frank Sinatra
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As we investigate intoxicants, we might recall that it was on this date in 1935 that the beer can (created by the American Can Co.) was introduced by the Gottfried Krueger Brewing Company of Newark, New Jersey. Made of tin, it weighed 4 ounces– still lighter than glass bottles– and required a “churchkey” opener. Pabst, based in Milwaukee, followed quickly, introducing their own (“Blue Ribbon”) line of canned beer later in the year.
“Humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than given credit for”*…
We looked earlier at the shrinking away of public companies in the U.S., both as a product of consolidation (of operations and of ownership) and of the (potentially dangerous) growth, in their stead, of private equity. University of Michigan professor Jerry Davis has a more optimistic take…
Public corporations have been dominant institutions in the American economy since the dawn of the 20th century. Whether due to their greater efficiency or power, listed corporations spread across nearly all industries. “Capitalism” in America was synonymous with “corporate capitalism,” and the number of exchange-listed companies grew with the size of the economy.
Yet since the late 1990s, the number of listed corporations has dropped by half in the US, underwritten by new technologies that lower the cost of assembling an enterprise. Meanwhile, neglected alternatives to the public corporation both old (e.g., mutuals, cooperatives) and new (e.g., open source, platform coops) have proven surprisingly durable. Given the manifest pathologies of shareholder capitalism, the combination of these two trends may suggest pathways out of our current dilemma…
[David explains how both consolidation among listed companies and the rise of private equity have contributed to this drop, but then raises a third, more general explanation…]
A more encompassing interpretation is that information and communication technologies (ICTs) have drastically changed the basic economic calculus of what an enterprise looks like and how it might be funded. In the US context, this has meant that companies prefer “buy” to “make,” as transaction cost enthusiasts might describe it. I coined the term Nikefication to describe the process of vertical dis-integration that reconfigured American industry during the 1990s and 2000s and the options it opens for alternative forms of enterprise, described in detail in previous books…
The vertical dis-integration of the American economy was driven by Wall Street and enabled by ICTs. Ironically, the result is that the capital requirements to create and scale a business can be much lower, reducing the rationale to go public in the first place. Indeed, IPO prospectuses routinely convey that the point of the IPO is not to raise capital, but to create a market for the company’s shares to enable VCs and employees to cash out – which is not the most persuasive pitch to potential buyers, and perhaps helps account for the disastrous post-IPO performance of most new listings.
The asset-lite model means fewer public companies, but it also suggests new possibilities for non-corporate forms that may be more human-scale and democratic. Nike’s profit-driven, asset- and employee-lite model is not the only option enabled by new technologies.
By “noncorporate” I mean forms of economic organization that are not owned by outside shareholders, although they may be legally organized as a corporation. These include mutuals (where consumers or members are also the owners); cooperatives (where workers, producers, or consumers are the owners); municipal enterprises (where citizens or governments own the enterprise); nonprofits; and open source projects. These forms are far more prevalent than one might expect, and in some cases they dominate their industry (e.g., property insurance, server software).
Noncorporate forms of enterprise have proven surprisingly resilient in the US. The Fortune 500 list for 2022 includes at least a dozen mutual insurance companies, including State Farm (#44), New York Life (#71), and Nationwide (#83). The single largest shareholder of over 350 of the 1000 largest American corporations is Vanguard—also a mutual. Land o’ Lakes (#213) is an agricultural cooperative owned by its producer-members, as are Ocean Spray and Blue Diamond. Ace Hardware is a retail cooperative in which local stores can be attuned to local needs and tastes yet gain the economies of scale of a large-scale brand. Jessica Gordon Nembhard’s brilliant book Collective Courage documents that cooperative forms thrived in African-American communities for generations – often overlooked by those who find data about the economy solely through online databases. And the US is home to nearly 5000 credit unions, which by law are not-for-profits, owned by their members.
Stanford Law professor Ron Gilson once quipped that if shareholders didn’t exist, they would have to be invented. That’s not quite true: plenty of American enterprises do quite well without shareholders. Indeed, civilization itself might be better without them. As I have written elsewhere, “nearly every major societal pathology in the West today – certainly in the USA – is caused or exacerbated by profit-oriented corporations,” including the opioid epidemic, the obesity crisis, the return of nicotine addiction among the young, democracy-undermining social media, and a climate catastrophe underwritten by the fossil fuel industry. Shareholder capitalism may be a suicide pact. Conversely, cooperatives are inherently democratic and accountable…
Institutional alternatives to public corporations are well-established in the US, and in some cases they lead their industry, such as mutuals in finance and insurance. But cooperatives have historically been thin on the ground here compared to Europe. According to the Democracy At Work Initiative, there were 612 worker cooperatives in 2021 –a 30% increase over 2019, but still a tiny number.
Perhaps the digital revolution has finally created the conditions for cooperatives to thrive. Research from the pre-digital era suggests that one of the factors limiting cooperatives is, for want of a better term, the transaction costs of democracy. A lot of workers’ time spent in meetings to engage in dialogue, debate, and polling is a price that corporate dictatorships don’t have to bear. But newer tools have dramatically reduced the transaction costs of democracy: the same smartphones that enable pervasive corporate surveillance also allow worker voice at scale on a continuous basis.
It is not just transaction costs that have declined: the required assets to start a business are also much cheaper now to own or rent. Capital equipment such as Computer Numerical Control tools, powered by software, gets better and cheaper much the same way other software-powered tools do. (Compare the price of a color laser printer in 1990 to one today.) This is also true of the software required to run an enterprise. It is possible to buy a knockoff version of the enterprise software underlying the Uber app for under $10,000 – and the Drivers Coop in New York is creating a version to “franchise” the locavore driver-owned coop alternative to Uber. The ICTs that dis-integrated the corporate economy have opened space for noncorporate alternatives that might be more democratic and human-scaled.
There are reasons for optimism here. Platform cooperatives merge the benefits of coops with accessible technology, and have been especially effective in industries in which the required new capital investment is low (home cleaning, home health aides, transit). Trebor Scholz’s new book Own This! provides details on the opportunities here. Municipally- or cooperative-owned fabrication facilities can enable enterprises with limited capital to launch and thrive. If the required investment to start a business is low, then the range of alternative institutions, including coops, is correspondingly larger.
The technologies exist to create low-cost alternatives to public corporations. Maybe we are not stuck with the legacy of 20th century corporate capitalism after all…
An optimistic (and aspirational) take on what might follow the economic reign of the public company: “Is This the End of Corporate Capitalism?” from @vanishingcorp via @iftf.
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As we ponder proprietorship, we might recall that, on this date in 1933 the hospitality industry got a boost as Congress ratified the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution– repealing the 18th Amendment, which had prohibited the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol. Prohibition had gone into effect in 1920 in an effort to reduce crime and improve public health, but it had backfired: despite massive public investment in enforcement, there was a sharp rise in organized crime (c.f.: bootleggers like Al Capone stepping in to supply black market booze) and the emergence of a “scofflaw” attitude on the part of a public that wanted its alcohol.
“Among the Igbo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten”*…
… Indeed. But, as T. W. Lim writes, palm oil has become so much more in our consumer economy…
My family used to take road trips to Malaysia when I was growing up, and I can clearly remember the first time I noticed the oil palms. They were unlike anything else in the landscape, which up to that point had been a patchwork of jungle, paddies, billboards, and the occasional roadside stand selling steamed sweet corn. The palms were distinctive, their dense crowns dark and heavyset atop sawtooth trunks, but what caught my eye was how these trees, unlike the other trees, had obviously been organized. When I asked my parents what they were, they said, “these are oil palms, which people plant to make money.”
This was the 1980s, and the rapidly developing country was agog at the miraculous versatility of palm oil – and the world’s seemingly endless appetite for this primordial goop, from which a whole new way of life could be coaxed. Looking back, I’m struck by the optimism. I have no way of knowing if conditions on palm oil plantations then were any less brutal and exploitative than they are today, but they were certainly less publicized. Maybe we’d still be optimistic if demand for palm oil hadn’t done a hockey stick.
But even in Singapore, situated between the two largest palm oil producers in the world, we didn’t think much about what problems the plantations might have brought. The first sign of trouble was the haze, which first came in the mid-90s. Smoke from massive forest fires in Indonesia hung over Singapore for days on end. It hung pale gray in the sky, turning sunsets red. The Indonesian government claimed it was due to indigenous tribes practicing slash-and-burn farming, but even the middle schoolers knew it was for oil palm. The haze has since become an annual event, varying only in its severity.
I’ve been thinking about palm oil for the same reason Spencer’s been thinking about rubber. These two agricultural commodities both emerged from the same systems of colonialism and forced labor, and together they shaped much of modern material culture. Much as rubber replaced spices and coffee as the cash crop of choice for the planter-barons of Malaya in the late 19th century, palm oil replaced rubber in the late 20th, capturing in two brushstrokes the transitions into the age of the internal combustion engine and the age of the global consumer. And just as rubber explains car culture and contemporary transportation systems, palm oil explains household consumption – and they both reveal the manufacturing systems, labor relations, and corporate structures that lie beneath.
As troubling as I find the systems that produce it, there’s an undeniable elegance to palm oil. Like fossil fuels, palm oil represents a technological shortcut to a wide variety of highly useful chemical compounds. Palm oil contains more saturated fat (50%) than other common edible vegetable oils, so it can be separated into a large number of fractions, each with different physical properties. An ideal palm oil derivative can be found for nearly any product that requires fat – soaps can be made foamier, hobnobs crisper, and ice creams more luscious. In industrial settings, palm oil derivatives are used in mold-release agents for concrete casting and to replace petroleum products in polymer production. Palm oil became integral to the tinning process almost as soon as tin cans were invented, and people were still filing patents for tinning oils based on palm oil in the 1950s. Palm oil was so plentiful, so cheap, and so well suited to the purpose, that tinned steel became obsolete before we bothered to find a better oil for tinning.
Because palm oil is still predominantly used in consumer packaged goods, especially in processed foods, it can seem like a luxury commodity – something used to make inconsequential things. It’s reasonable to think our civilization is less dependent on hobnobs than on the pneumatic tire. But hobnobs and road transport both embody larger social systems, and whether we choose to change our relationship with palm oil might depend more on social systems than physical ones. Trying to imagine a world without palm oil is almost like trying to imagine a post-consumer society, which is precisely why it’s an interesting subject.
Read on for a fascinating consideration of a seemingly universal ingredient, the first in a series: “A Technological Shortcut,” from @the_prepared.
* Chinua Achebe
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As we interrogate ingredients, we might recall that it was on this date in 1789 that Baptist minister Elijah Craig distilled the first bourbon whisky from corn (another universal ingredient– gift article). Craig, who is also credited with many other Kentucky firsts (e.g., fulling mill, paper mill, ropewalk) is also said to have been the first to age the product in charred oak casks, a process that gives bourbon its brownish color and distinctive taste.
“When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading”*…
As we’ve seen before, Prohibition spawned a number of creative work-arounds, some more legal than others. Most of them faded away with the 21st Amendment; but as Olivia White explains, one is still going strong…
Just off the coast of Winsconsin, in the frigid depths of Lake Michigan, sits Washington Island, a tiny island home to just over 700 people. Despite the small, three-digit population, Washington Island outsells every other town in the world when it comes to the amount of Angostura bitters consumed per capita. What could possibly be driving such impressive sales in such a small, remote place? Turns out the answer points back to one bar — Nelsen’s Hall — and it’s not because they’re dishing out thousands of Old Fashioneds.
Rather than garnering the title of largest Angostura purveyor by using the ingredient in an abundance of cocktails, Nelsen’s is famous for kick-starting the bizarre tradition of taking shots of Angostura. Not shots containing various spirits and a dash or two of Angostura, but 1.5-ounce servings of straight-up bitters.
First opened as a dance hall in 1899, Nelsen’s Hall was founded by Tom Nelsen, who expanded the space into a bar three years later. Less than two decades later, when Prohibition threatened the security of his bar, Nelsen was forced to get crafty in coming up with ways to remain open. Instead of operating with an alcohol license — which had for obvious reasons been stripped away — Nelsen acquired a pharmaceutical license as a sneaky way to legally sell the shots.
As Angostura bitters are only intended to be used a few drops at a time, at the time of Prohibition, they were classified as a “stomach tonic for medicinal purposes,” despite the fact that they contain 44.7 percent alcohol by volume. As such, Nelsen acquired a pharmaceutical license that allowed him to legally distribute Angostura as a medical tincture…
Today, the Angostura shot remains one of the most popular menu items at Nelsen’s Hall, which is known to go through three cases of bitters on busier weekends. Annually, the bar sells upwards of 10,000 Angostura shots; every person who chooses to partake earns a spot in the “Bitters Club” and receives a card certifying that they have “taken ‘the Cure’ by consuming the prescribed measure of bitters and as such [are] a fully initiated member of the Bitters Club.” Upon signing their own name in a decades-old book, shot-takers are “considered a full-fledged Islander and entitled to mingle, dance, etc. with all the other islanders.”
The vestigial remains of long-dead regulation: “Wisconsinites Drink an Ungodly Amount of Angostura — Blame It on a Prohibition Loophole,” from @VinePair.
* Henny Youngman
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As we contemplate unintended consequences, we might send dry birthday greetings to Alphonso Alvah Hopkins; he was born on this date in 1843. A teacher, author, journalist, editor, publisher, and politician, he is best remembered as one of the leading Temperance activists of his time. Hopkins ran as the Temperance Party’s candidate for New York State’s Secretary of State, member of Congress, and Governor; he published several books, including two temperance novels entitled His Prison Bars, and Sinner and Saint, and Wealth and Waste, a treatise which applies the principle of political economy to the problems of labor, law, and the liquor traffic; and throughout, he taught at the American Temperance University.
“The idea that there might be limits to growth is for many people impossible to imagine”*…
Jason Wilson on the Carthusian monks’ decision to limit production of their famed liqueur and what it says about quality and scale in our modern world…
[In January, 2023] a letter from the Carthusian monks in Voiron, France circulated through the world of spirits. It was, in the hackneyed parlance of journalism, a “bombshell.” The letter explains a decision by the monks to limit the production of Charteuse, their famed Alpine liqueur dating to 1605, in order “to focus on their primary goal: protect their monastic life and devote their time to solitude and prayer.”
Apparently this decision had been made quietly in 2021 (quietly being how most decisions are made in a monastic order sworn to a vow of silence). A growing Chartreuse shortage started being noticed by spirits enthusiasts during 2022. The drinks website Punch verified the letter a couple of weeks ago. Chartreuse will now only be sold exclusively under allocation, making it much more difficult to find.
First of all, allow me to applaud this stance by the Carthusian monks. I deeply admire their willingness to say “enough” to the relentless market forces pushing them to produce more, more, more, at all costs. It’s honestly inspiring that the monks refuse to see their earthly purpose as satisfying the demands of some knucklehead mixologist doing his little riff on the Last Word at some lame speakeasy in some third-tier city.
Less but better and for longer. What a refreshing thing to hear in 2023. In nearly every other realm of our soul-crushing age, the focus is to scale everything as big as possible, quality be damned. As someone who operates in a media industry that values an endless stream of cheap, SEO-driven clickbait over well-written, thoughtful content that costs effort and money to produce, I stand with the monks…
“Where Has All the Chartreuse Gone?” from @boozecolumnist.
* Donella Meadows
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As we find balance, we might recall that it was on this date in 1915 that Absinthe is outlawed in France and several other countries.
Absinthe was a licorice/anise flavored liqueur that contained wormwood, and was 132 proof. The high alcohol content, and the presence of the toxic oil thujone from the wormwood, seemed to cause hallucinations, convulsions, and severe mental problems amongst hard core absinthe drinkers.
In response to the ban, Henry-Louis Pernod, who manufactured Absinthe, came out with the lower alcohol, wormwood free liqueur ‘Pernod’, to replace Absinthe… though Absinthe sales were subsequently reinstated in the E.U.
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