Alcohol: A History by Rod Phillips (review)

This richly textured and informative treatise on humankind’s “love affair” with alcoholic beverages through the millennia expands upon Phillips’ A Short History of Wine (New York, 2001), following a similar chronological format. Phillips focuses on the past 500 years (nearly three-quarters of the book), showing how Europe’s relationship to alcoholic beverages and regulations for their use/abuse have evolved and spread to other parts of the world. Contrary to what one might expect from the title of the book and the goal of providing a “global” history (5), the rich panoply of alcoholic beverages in Africa, Asia, Polynesia, the Americas, etc. are largely viewed, as it were, through a “European lens.”

Although Phillips sets the fascinating and far-flung dimensions of alcohol and fermentation within a larger biological and hominid context (6–7), he could have taken greater advantage of interdisciplinary findings. For example, he does not mention that astrophysicists using microwave and far-infrared-frequency telescopes have recently detected massive clouds of ethyl and other alcohols in the star-forming regions at the center of the Milky Way, with significant implications for the beginning of life on earth.¹ He might have stressed that anaerobic fermentation or glycolysis is probably the earliest energy system on the planet, dating back 4 billion years. The availability of a kind of “carbonated, alcoholic beverage,” even before water, might explain why many animals, ranging from fruit flies to elephants, share many of the same genes and physiologies as humans for sensing and metabolizing alcohol (about 10 percent of the enzymes in our livers serve to metabolize alcohol into energy). The enjoyment that most animals, including humans, derive from alcohol is a result of a “pleasure cascade” of neurotransmitters in their brain, and the unpleasant effects of over-indulgence (including loss of coordination, followed by sedation and finally paralysis or worse) are not confined to humans. In light of such considerations, is it any wonder that the consumption of alcoholic beverages, which is literally in “our genes,” is no easier to prevent through legislation than is, say, sugar?

The modern-Eurocentric approach of the book, informed by recent prohibition movements, probably contributes to Phillips’ largely negative approach to alcoholic beverages. Although he recognizes alcohol’s positive aspects—religious, social, medical, economic, etc.—he devotes most of his attention to such deleterious effects as the “gin-craze” of early eighteenth-century England or the drunken behavior of native peoples in the Americas and Africa (124–130, 149–150, 217–218). A more positive view would recognize the human ingenuity responsible for the discovery of how to make fermented beverages and how they have been incorporated into numerous cultures around the world from prehistory up to the present. For example, today’s African cultures are awash in sorghum and millet beers, honey mead, and banana and palm wines. Their ancient precedents, possibly extending back to the beginning of our species some 100,000 years ago, formed the social and religious core of countless “alcohol cultures” throughout the continent. They comprise the neglected part of a story obscured by European drinks, customs, and regulations. Similarly, in the Americas, ancient humans discovered how to make alcoholic beverage from a host of previously unknown fruits, cacti, and carbohydrate resources, which became central to everyday life, ceremonial activities, major public events, and the economies of numerous native peoples. Preeminent was a fermented chocolate beverage that Phillips does not mention. The same points apply to East Asia and Europe, beyond Greece and Rome.

A number of misconceptions have crept into Phillips’ otherwise interesting and accurate history. The earliest alcoholic beverages of humankind probably derived from the mastication of carbohydrate resources (wild grains, tubers, grasses, etc.), in addition to the collection of ripe fruit and honey and their natural fermentation to wine and mead because of associated yeast (10). Human saliva contains enzymes which readily transform carbohydrates into sugars; the resulting sweet expectorated liquid attracts insects who inoculate it with yeast and produce a beer. For example, numerous...