Drinks on Me
Shot by shot, the science and sentiments of alcohol consumption
Welcome to 2025—a year where I assume a whole bunch of norms are going to be upended. And we’re starting off with one helluva round…
Like many of you, I’m reckoning with the implications of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s report on alcohol and cancer, distilled here in a series of infographics. Yet beyond the food world, plenty of Americans have become inured to reports like Murthy’s, which seem to crop up ever so often, especially in January when people are psychologically most open to changing their consumption habits. However, this is the first time such a report has come from the U.S. Surgeon General (bringing the U.S. in line with health recommendations from other countries.) The report delivers a harsh verdict: that no level of alcohol consumption, and no type of alcohol consumption, has any evidence of health benefit, and in fact can be directly linked to at least seven types of cancer. Murthy’s report runs counter to the December report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine last month, which argues that there might be a connection between moderate drinking and a lower risk of heart attacks or strokes. It’s worth reading both Murthy’s and the National Academies reports in full, especially as the latter will be used to shape the next round of dietary recommendations from HHS. (How that will go with a teetotaler and general science skeptic at the helm is hard to say.)
In case it wasn’t clear from my past posts, I’m not a scientist, nutritionist, or health faddist, and I wouldn’t call myself either a total abstainer or a heavy drinker. Like most adults, I’m probably somewhere in between. I routinely enjoy wine at home and in restaurants, sip whiskey neat in winter and gin with lime in summer, and look forward to the occasional dry martini. I also spent the last two weeks in Italy, where every dinner table had pitchers of excellent vino della casa, a seemingly required accompaniment to gustatory pleasure. (To summarize the Italian perspective on wine, just look to Professor Giorgio Calabrese, a renowned Italian nutritionist and scientific journalist for RAI, who has said that “Wine is not a drink, but rather a liquid food.”) It’s hard to imagine a world in which I wouldn’t consume at least some alcohol on the regular—not only for work, but also as a source of personal pleasure.
So it makes me squirm with painful self-recognition to read the comments peppering the New York Times with feedback on these latest alcohol warnings, defensively poking holes in the data while saying that that an increase in 1-2% likelihood of cancer “isn’t significant enough” to put them off their regular drinks. (As one man said, as someone “who has two glasses of wine on a typical day, my risk of having cancer some time during my life goes from 10 percent to 13 percent. Where's my corkscrew?”) The impulse to defend drinking habits in the face of substantial scientific evidence feels like a knee-jerk response, but it’s a response shared by many American consumers. As Susan Cheever, renowned historian and daughter of the (famously alcoholic) novelist John Cheever, puts it in Drinking in America, it is impossible to extricate alcohol from American culture and history, and we must see drinking as “a force of both pleasure and pain, a force of both brilliance and incompetence.” For people who deeply treasure their local watering holes, their evening cocktails, or their celebratory champagne, the right to drink feels like a crucial element of their personal freedom.
However, if we’re going to have honest conversations about alcohol consumption in America, we must question why we’ve given alcohol so much symbolic power, and what such symbolism costs us. It’s worth rereading this brilliant 2023 piece from historian Natalia Mehlman Petrzela on the ways in which alcohol culturally functions as the “perfect pairing with the all-consuming endeavor of motherhood.” For women in the post-prohibition era, consuming alcohol has become an easy way to signify one’s willingness to let loose and be free. For mothers in particular, especially those who endured the claustrophobia of the pandemic, the evening drink became a too-accessible on/off switch, the first sip drawing a line between the end of the parenting shift and the beginning of “me” time. As Petrzela puts it, “It’s an American tradition to sell individual women ways to induce a chemical calm rather than actually address the larger systematic imbalances that produce their stress and anxiety.” (Even many non-alcoholic brands promise to give you a “buzz”, suggesting that we’ll tolerate almost anything except total sobriety.) Rather than supporting women, American culture and commerce sedates them, at a profit of almost 200 billion dollars a year. Regardless of a woman’s drink of choice, it’s the framing of drinking-as-choice that may be the most dangerous marketing ploy of all—the idea that your daily drink is a way of reclaiming your life.
The branding of alcohol as a stylish and safe release makes it even easier to create false dichotomies between “good’” and “bad” drinking, drawn not just on how much we drink, but what we drink as well. Especially for educated and middle-to-upper-class consumers, it’s easy to think of “bad” drinking as the thing that happens over there in less responsible, less tasteful households, far from the reach of craft distilleries, microbreweries, or elegant wine bars. It’s even more desirable to assume that problem drinking only happens in conjunction with other “bad” behaviors, like a lack of exercise or a penchant for fast food. But anyone who has known firsthand the feeling after a night of too much indulgence, nausea and headache and “never again,” knows that the body doesn’t discriminate based on aesthetics, income, or education. It’s my own remembrance of that feeling that pulls at me as I read these reports, and I have to concede that alcohol, like many other elements of the SAD, is probably doing me more harm than good, not only to my body but also to the culture I live in. To quote the great sage Homer Simpson, alcohol is “the cause of—and solution to—all of life’s problems,” and an essential part of American life…unless we decide it isn’t.
As I write this post, I’m sipping on a delicious spiced old-fashioned from Little Saints, a non-alcoholic spirits company that uses botanicals and mushrooms. I bought it at my local wine store as part of my Dry January plan. The first time I took a prolonged, intentional break from alcohol, it was pregnancy-induced, and it felt easy to step away for the purposes of protecting my future child’s health—I had an excuse that everyone understood, which made it easier to not feel like I was missing out. Dry January gives a similar framework to defend one’s choices, and a fresh opportunity to try the many delicious non-alcoholic options that have come into the marketplace (a vast improvement in the five years since my pregnancy). There has also been a seismic shift in how food writers cover alcohol-free options, reporting on the toll alcohol and drugs on the hospitality industry, and championing the growth of the alcohol-free marketplace and movement. This is service journalism at its best, giving non-drinkers a forum for meaningful conversations about what it means to opt out of drinking life. And while it’s impossible to say if I’ll continue to abstain after the month is over, imagining a future in which alcohol and pleasure don’t go hand and hand feels more possible—and more necessary—than ever.
Recommended Reading: During my holiday travels, I spent a fair amount of time on the massive queue of articles in my Instapaper feed, occasionally sorting to prioritize my oldest saved articles back from 2020 (a seeming lifetime ago). Good thing I did, because Aaron Timms’ “Salt, Fat, Acid, Defeat” in n+1 begged for a slow and steady read, thinking about what the restaurant and food industry learned—or should have learned—during the pandemic. Set against my reading of Rachel Hope Cleves’ Lustful Appetites (so good, get it when it drops in early Feb), it’s a valuable reminder that the role of the restaurant in society is ever-changing, and that chefs and restauranteurs must evolve their art in dialogue with the sensual needs—and gastronomic politics—of the public. Brutal and necessary in 2020, and even more necessary when read today.
The Perfect Bite: At the start of my most recent trip to Italy, I said I’d be abstaining from the carb-heavy primi portions of the meal, giving more attention to the secondi and contorni sections of the menu. That resolution lasted about a nanosecond, and it’s a good thing, because then I would have missed not only spoonfuls of creamy apple risotto with smoked pesce persico at El Barbapedana in Milan, perfect Neapolitan-style pizza at Da Michele (attached to Rome’s fantastic children’s museum), linguini “sicilia bedda” with sardines, pine nuts, and raisins at L’Angolo di Sicilia in the Prati neighborhood, and a house-made fettuccine con carciofi at Antico Forno in Testaccio. I probably won’t have pasta for at least another few weeks, because the memory of the past meals will be more than enough to sustain me.
Cooked & Consumed: As much as I love traveling, the first home-cooked meal back is like a release valve for me, and a truly rewarding reminder of why cooking is a creative outlet. A can of chickpeas, a sliced Japanese sweet potato, chopped bell peppers and tomatoes, a handful of spinach, and a few tablespoons of cumin, garam masala, and turmeric, all stewed up and served over brown rice, is about as restorative as a welcome-back meal can be. I can’t guarantee much about the coming year, but it’s sure to be full of flavor.