Drunk No More

I came across this fairly detailed look at the decrease in alcohol consumption and drunkenness in Europe from a post on kottke.org.

The writer attributes the huge drop to industrialization and the concomitant need for workers to be sober, which is a plausible hypothesis. I've read before that it had to do with increasing access to safe sources of drinking water, which decreased the need for alcohol — which is much safer to drink than contaminated water — as a source of liquid. I've also read several times that it was related to the introduction of tea and coffee, which both have antimicrobial properties, making them a safer substitute liquid.

The sobering of Europe, and coffeehouse culture in particular, has been the subject of writers like Stephen Johnson. Imagine going from being drunk to being hopped on caffeine. It might make you into a bit of a thinker who wants to talk with other people about ideas. 

The astounding decrease in how much Europeans drink, now vs. about 1700, is pretty astounding. Americans tend to think of Italians and French people as drinking a lot of wine, or Germans and English as drinking a lot of beer, but it's not true, compared to their progenitors. 

This is the money quote from the article: the "large consumption among workers and soldiers would mean that around a quarter to close to half of the calories in their diet were from booze."

This article also makes me think of Johnny Appleseed in the U.S. The reason he was such a popular figure then, and continuing in memory, is because rural people everywhere made their own hard cider (well after 1700) and for that, you need apple trees. 

I don't know if there are stats about the decline of Americans' alcohol consumption to parallel the ones in Europe, and if so, when it happened. I do know that the vast majority of alcohol consumption in the U.S. now is done by a small percentage of the population: essentially a negative type of power-law distribution.