Alcohol in our society part 1

Alcohol has long been part of our culture. In this five-part series about 'alcohol in our society', Rob Bovens, alcohol researcher and coordinator of the Academic Workplace Addiction at Tranzo Tilburg University, takes you to the very beginning and ends in part 5 with the contemporary role of alcohol in our society. Today we kick off with: alcohol is of all times.

“Alcohol has been consumed in our society since time immemorial. Did you know that a team of archaeologists in Georgia found 8,000-year-old fragments of jars that used to hold wine? Clay tablets in the Egyptian Nile Delta with recipes for alcoholic beverages date from the same period. And pottery from 7,400 years ago already pointed to the existence of beer in Iran and Iraq. With regard to Western Europe: until recently we thought that the wine tradition here was not older than more than 3,000 years, by a discovery in southern Sicily of wine barrels in a cave near Agrigento from 4,000 BC, this number could be multiplied by two .

Pleasure vs Sin

Both the advantages and disadvantages of alcoholic beverages have been known for a long time. The Greek writer Hesiod (700 BC) calls wine a gift from Dionysos (wine god), but says that drink 'changes the shape of the brain and tongue'. In Egyptian burial chambers writings have been found with statements by a priest about drunkenness: "I forbid you to go to the pub, you are degenerate like the beasts." In contrast, the Aztec people of the Mexico of the Middle Ages saw the positive sides of alcohol: drunkenness was a mandatory affair at their worship services. Wine occupies a central place in Christian worship from the outset. And in those same Middle Ages, beer made from 1% alcohol was used as a daily drink in Europe, because it was cleaner than normal drinking water. It is therefore not surprising that alcohol consumption in the Netherlands declined with the arrival of clean tap water.”