History of the World in Six Glasses: Beer, Coffee & Coke

Introduction: Beverages as Historical Lenses

The History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage chronicles human history through changing tastes in beverages, spanning from beer to wine to spirits (hard liquor), coffee to tea, and ending with Coca-Cola. Although many books have explored human history through the lens of a singular foodstuff, few have used beverages. Yet, as Standage points out in his introduction, although a person can survive without food for a relatively long period of time, without liquids he or she will perish in days. Beverages also have intoxicating properties that can change the way civilizations unfold, either causing drunkenness or alertness. It is perhaps for that reason that so many cultures and nations have defined themselves according to what they drink, more so than what they eat. The British define themselves as tea-drinkers, as do the Chinese. America is the nation of the cocktail — and Coca-Cola.

The central, driving thesis of Standage's book is that even more so than food, if you "tell me what you drink, I will tell you who you are." A civilization's beverage of choice is revealing because it denotes the environmental and economic pressures to which the society was subject and reflects existing class divides and social norms. Consider the divide between beer drinkers and wine drinkers in contemporary America. But the choice of beverage is also a "two-way street" — beverages help shape and create a society. Consider how the availability of coffee has helped create our contemporary 24/7 culture, or how the availability of cheap, caloric sodas has contributed to our obesity crisis.

Beer: From Sacred Staple to Everyman's Drink

Contrary to what most might expect to be the logical start of his tale — wine — Standage begins with beer. Beer is a surprisingly old beverage, with roots in early human agriculture. It marked the shift from a hunter-gatherer existence to an agricultural lifestyle defined by manufactured tools. Gradually, many tribes abandoned the hunting existence that required humans to rely solely upon nature. The reasons humans shifted from hunter-gathering to agriculture remain uncertain, although the change may have been driven by the greater availability of food made possible by regular growing, planting, and harvesting (Standage 20). Agriculture ensured a more reliable source of food for large populations — though some have argued that the popularity of beer itself was one reason human beings became more rooted to the land.

Beer was widespread in the Near East by 4000 BCE (Standage 10). Eventually, the cultivation of cereal grains led to the discovery of fermentation, and unlike wine made from fruit or honey, cereal grains were always available (Standage 15). In ancient Egypt, beer was a sacred beverage, far removed from how we conceive of it today as an "everyman" brew. Beer was the drink of choice of Osiris, the god of the afterlife (Standage 19). Beer also had nutritive properties — it was high in vitamin B, which was often lacking in the diets of farming peoples with limited access to meat. And unlike meat, cereal grains have an almost indefinite storage lifespan. Beer was also often safer than water to drink because it was boiled and treated. Moreover, the beer produced at that time likely had a much lower alcohol content than what we commonly consume today, meaning that drinking it regularly as a staple food would not have rendered the population unfit for work.

Although beer was probably loved for its mildly intoxicating properties, its uses spanned far more applications than mere indulgence. "There is no question that the daily lives of Egyptians and Mesopotamians, young and old, rich and poor, were steeped in beer" (Standage 23). It should be noted that initially beer lacked the class resonances it possesses today, but even in the Near East it eventually began to acquire some of its present-day associations. By the time of the reign of King Ashurnasirpal II of Assyria, for example, wine was clearly a beverage of the upper classes and a sign of the king's wealth and power. Wine was a kind of exotic drink as opposed to humble beer, and various extant Assyrian inscriptions attribute wine to the upper classes (Standage 44–46). "Beer had not been banished" and was still served in considerable quantities, but there was a clear class divide between beer and the status attached to wine (Standage 46). Greece imported most of its wine during the early stages of civilization, and it became a ubiquitous beverage at almost every elite party or symposium (Standage 46–47).

What proved so attractive about beer — its ability to be produced regularly and cheaply, and the fact that even common people could enjoy it — to some extent proved to be its undoing as the beverage favored by the upper classes. The beer versus wine divide illustrates the extent to which beverages can be implicated in a web of class resonances. Some of these class markers are intrinsic to the beverage itself, such as the humble origins of beer in grains; others are not. As wine increasingly became the beverage of elites, a simple bottle, depending on its vintage, could cost hundreds of dollars — even if the difference between a very expensive and a moderately expensive wine might elude all but the most cultivated palate. It does not matter: the act of consuming something expensive carries social resonance in terms of displaying wealth, in a manner that far exceeds the actual properties of the beverage.

Conclusion: What We Drink Defines Who We Are

Today, the original symbolism of beer, coffee, and Coca-Cola is far different from what it was originally — and yet there is some consistency. Beer is the alcohol of the working man; coffee is the beverage of the elites; and Coca-Cola symbolizes all that is bad and good about America. The calls to ban or tax soda sales show that even today, what we drink defines who we are in the cultural imagination. The beverage of our contemporary 21st-century culture remains uncertain — whether it will be one of the beverages in Standage's text or something else entirely — but the centrality of what we drink is unlikely to dissipate as a social and historical preoccupation.