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> Given the price, Americans drank an absurdly, mind-bendingly large amount of booze. I once skimmed Prohibition-era academic text that described US drinking c
by ekidd 5y ago
> Given the price, Americans drank an absurdly, mind-bendingly large amount of booze.
I once skimmed Prohibition-era academic text that described US drinking culture of the pre-Prohibition period in detail. It was fairly disturbing, as you suggest—whiskey in serving sizes that would work better with beer, and things like that.
But even though Prohibition failed to stop people from drinking, it apparently _did_ disrupt the earlier drinking culture in many ways. So I would be careful about using pre-Prohibition behavior to make inferences about post-Prohibition behavior.
(I'd love to find that book again, but sadly the library which had it got rid of a substantial number of rarely-used older books at some point.)
- ABCLAW 5y agoMy statement isn't that Americans are still drowning in cheaper than milk corn-booze. It's that there's a shared history regarding alcohol consumption which is uniquely American in nature. Prohibition is part of that unique experience, and very much a part of the explanation for the compression of the consumption distribution.
- zwp 5y agoA slight tangent but Hogarth's "Beer Street and Gin Lane" (1751) documents a similar example of low grain prices resulting in massive, country-wide alcohol consumption in England. The subsequent government reaction and legislation did not go as far as American prohibition though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane