I am a teetotaler with a vow to abstain for life. I never enjoyed getting drunk, but I did love the taste of various kinds of alcohol. I took the vow not for myself, but because I've endured friends, acquaintances, and strangers who were drunk, violent, unreasonable, and abusive, and that all needs to stop.
That being said, when I researched my family I found out about the Whisky Rebellion in post-Revolution Pennsylvania. And I learned some very interesting things about alcohol and distilling.
Alcohol production solves two very, very big problems for pragmatic farmers. If we look past the industrial-complex production of alcohol today, we can see that grain farmers sometimes ended up with surplus crops that couldn't be sold as grain. They also had massive volume that was difficult to both store and transport. When you have a distillery apparatus nearby, and you can send your crop surplus into this distillery, the problems of surplus, storage, and transportation are suddenly turned into liquid gold.
And these are the chief reasons that alcohol production has grown up alongside agriculture, and these are reasons why it isn't a simple thing to just tell everyone that "drinking is bad and everyone must quit". Because you're just giving a huge slap in the face to grain farmers (or potato farmers of Russia or whatever they may be contributing.)
That is why today, I have nothing against drinking in moderation and drinking for pleasure or enjoyment; it is a venerable part of any economy, and it is really something that needs to be cherished and preserved.
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I am a teetotaler with a vow to abstain for life. I never enjoyed getting drunk, but I did love the taste of various kinds of alcohol. I took the vow not for myself, but because I've endured friends, acquaintances, and strangers who were drunk, violent, unreasonable, and abusive, and that all needs to stop.
That being said, when I researched my family I found out about the Whisky Rebellion in post-Revolution Pennsylvania. And I learned some very interesting things about alcohol and distilling.
Alcohol production solves two very, very big problems for pragmatic farmers. If we look past the industrial-complex production of alcohol today, we can see that grain farmers sometimes ended up with surplus crops that couldn't be sold as grain. They also had massive volume that was difficult to both store and transport. When you have a distillery apparatus nearby, and you can send your crop surplus into this distillery, the problems of surplus, storage, and transportation are suddenly turned into liquid gold.
And these are the chief reasons that alcohol production has grown up alongside agriculture, and these are reasons why it isn't a simple thing to just tell everyone that "drinking is bad and everyone must quit". Because you're just giving a huge slap in the face to grain farmers (or potato farmers of Russia or whatever they may be contributing.)
That is why today, I have nothing against drinking in moderation and drinking for pleasure or enjoyment; it is a venerable part of any economy, and it is really something that needs to be cherished and preserved.