Food, drink, and other tastes of culture

Guten Abend!

I started this week's kulture post by reading "An Obsession Explained", which offers an amusing description of various types of authentic alcoholic drinks. Oh, and remember to toast those around you! Of particular worth in this article was the various descriptions of how hung over you will be after imbibing the various drinks. To quote:

"Berliner Weisse is served mainly in an around Berlin and you really shouldn't allow yourself to be seen drinking the stuff. It's an embarrassment. At just 2.8 percent, the alcohol content is low and it is often served with a straw. Popular in the summer, it is served with a disgustingly sweet syrup that makes it green or red.

Hangover risk: Inapplicable. If you drink enough of this stuff to get a hangover, it's your own damn fault."

^That largely set the tone for enjoying that article. As drinking does not actually appeal to me however, the descriptions of the various drinks did not stick with me well.

The next article I read was "Capping the Bottle", which provided a nice counter-weight to the first article. This article discussed, among other things, the movements to tighten-up the public drinking laws in Germany, as public intoxication has strong correlation to increased incidence of crime. (Not a shocker at all...) Unsurprisingly, the idea of banning public drinking is as well-received in Germany as the prohibition was in the US. So the article describes various other measures they use to try to reduce public intoxication.

The final choice article I read was on Eco-centrism in Germany. That is to say, a movement in Germany towards organic foods. As a person who is going into medicine, and likely to major in chemistry, I have to say I can definitely agree with the philosophy- the amount of damage you can face from the chemicals used in food is both surprising and disturbing. [Tangent] An example of this is use of growth hormone to increase the size and weight of animals. Some of these growth hormones stay in the meat after it has been cooked, and has some effect upon consumption in people. This can force a body to grow beyond intended dimensions for the person, and this usually can (and indeed does) result in increased incidence of joint/bone/tendon issues. [/Tangent] Long story short, Germany gets a thumbs-up in my mind here.

After this, I moved along to the mandatory-reading articles, starting with Optimists are Idiots. I actually did not know how to take this article when I read it. On the one hand, I prefer to follow a philosophy of "hope for the best but expect the worst", so I could see a certain level of pragmatism to it. On the other hand... I had a hard time imagining that I could take this article as literally as it presents itself. (In other words, while I could believe there is a certain level of bias against excessive optimism, I could not believe it was as negative as it was represented.

As for Teutonic humor- Upon reading the article, I felt I would probably appreciate the Berlin or Hamburg varieties of humor the most, though again I felt it was probably more blanket-stereotyping, and not perfectly representative.

And thus ends this week's run on culture!

Tschuess!