Drinking in the simplicity
In the beginning there were drinks and the drinks were simple and the drinks were two. Those drinks were milk and water. But there’s nothing milk-andwater about milk and water. Milk’s our foundational drink. It is mammalian essence. See the seal giving suck on the rocks of Kaikōura. Plug a human baby to that teat and it would thrive and grow flippers. Wolves suckled Romulus and Remus. Cows suckle most of us. Stealing milk from them is our national business. New Zealand cows suckle babies around the globe.
Water is more fundamental still. Our pre-mammalian forebears spent a billion years in it evolving. We still spend our first nine months in water. When we are born our lungs are full of water. More than half of our physical body is water. We drink water every day to replenish ourselves. And water is just water, simple and perfect, whether it comes from creek, lake, river, well, tank, tap or plastic bottle with a brand name, a fake teat and a price tag defying belief.
Every mammal but us drinks only milk and water, from the day of its birth to the day of its death. But we are man the maker, the mammal with the dicky psyche. We discovered a third drink, booze.
All human societies have made booze. Some have tried to ban it, but they never succeed for long. Booze is just too nice. Medieval Europe ran on it. The water supply was so iffy, they drank beer from dawn to dusk, small beer, weak beer, but still beer. The Middle Ages were befuddled.
Booze comes in a thousand varieties but whatever the ads might try to tell you, it’s the booziness that matters, not the variety. Kingsley Amis observed that all beer ads could be reduced to one line: Drink Blank Beer. It makes you drunk.
After booze came the stimulant drinks, the hot infusions, the adult pick-me-ups. Instead of befuddling the drinker they sharpened him, made him alert. Luke-warm tea has kept China awake for millennia. A thick black coffee revs the mental engine on a cold morning, makes the long day faceable.
Booze and the stimulants helped the fraught adult soul, but then, in the 20th century, came a drink for children: fizzy pop. It was appalling stuff. Ingredients: water, flavouring, colouring, fizz, and a shovelful of sugar. It was liquid lollies. Children clamoured for it. Adults shrank from it. Except in the States where they drink pop and eat burgers from cradle to 6XL grave.
Milk, water, booze, stimulants, pop: these, then, were the drinks on tap when I was a kid. Today the first four remain unchanged and splendid. But go look in the chiller at the supermarket. See how the pop’s had pups.
Two pop-pups in particular have grown grotesquely huge. Pup one, the energy drink.
Ingredients: water, extracts of bull, a shot of caffeine and a double shovelful of sugar. It’s cold sweet coffee for the gullible young. The caffeine wakes them up. The sugar fattens them up. The advertising sells them down the river. And the profits buy an F1 racing team. All in all, a masterpiece of marketing. As is pop pup two, the sports drink.
There are two true sports drinks: water during and beer after. That’s it. But the new-fangled sports drink – ingredients: water, pseudo-science, needless electrolytes and a shovelful of sweetener – is plugged by sports stars to dupe their youthful fans into buying and glugging what the Harvard School of Public Health calls “just another sugary drink”.
Man the drinker, man the maker, man the exploiter of his dumb fellow man.