Eat, drink and be merry

Sitting reading the Guardian online, I came across a story that interested me. Well, there was more than one, actually, but this is the one I was most bemused by. The guy who lives without cash was interesting enough, sure, but the fact that there is an official designation of drinks in the US labelled as "imitation alcohol" was a whole new thing for me. I'd always naively figured that something either was alcoholic, or it wasn't. At less than 0.5%, it's probably got less than a Cherry Ripe, although that too is a contentious subject.

It seems to me that this is a case of over zealous policing, combined with ignorance that old-school bottles used to contain things other than booze. Sometimes they contained laudanum as well. Sometimes, they even held lemonade. The bottle doesn't make it alcoholic. The trace amounts that they mention on the label would come about in almost anything the combines fruit juice and sugar. Hell, leave a bottle of apple juice out of the fridge or in the sun for too long and you could get merrily rolling along fairly quickly. It wouldn't taste too good, but that's why you buy your alcohol from people whose brewing technique is a little more advanced. Actually, if getting alcohol out of schools entirely is what they're after, they may wish to take a look at some of the experiments going on in the science labs. I'm pretty sure I remember doing a more complicated version of the apple juice experiment when I was at school. Of course, they didn't let us drink the stuff, but I'm pretty sure some people would look askance at teaching a room full of 15 year old how to distill liquor. They're probably the same people who would disapprove of Mr P's hilarious exploding milo tin gag as well though, so what do they know?

I'm not going to glorify drinking. There's enough of that goes on elsewhere. I like a drink or five myself, but I'm also the legal age. If I had any alcohol in my system before the legal age, well, that's between me and the idiots who let me into the clubs as a 17 year old without even asking me to produce a fake ID. But seriously, folks. Alcohol is not evil in and of itself. It's been around for centuries. It does have some good properties; think how much more painful and deadly 16th century surgery would have been without alcohol to act as both anaesthetic and antiseptic? Those two people who survived their operations would surely have died. People need to take a little responsibility for their own actions. That kid who went to the principal and reported the problem? Nobody was making him drink it. Personally, the "less than" part would have told me that it was pretty much 0%, which is good enough for me. The people at Fosters, who now feel that their David Boon dolls were a mistake should have been more put off by the amount of beer you needed to buy to get one (from memory it was a slab; 24 cans for those not in Australia) than the fact that he once consumed 52 cans on a flight between Australia and the UK. It wasn't Boonie that was encouraging the drinking, it was Fosters. But who could be surprised? It's the reason for their existence, after all. Much like making non-alcoholic lemonade is the reason for the existence of Fentimans. Call it what it is, people. It's lemonade, made from real lemons, no less, not imitation anything else.