In the battle against boozing, it may pay to have a sense of humour
By The Age | theage.com.au | 06 October
French gastronomes and Scottish boozers are having serious difficulty digesting the news that The Louvre is to get a McDonalds hamburger joint and that an Aberdeenshire brewery has released a beer so low in alcohol it won't even be subject to beer duty.
The French, of course, haven't got much of a sense of humour when it comes to matters culinary. But they radiate such elan in their displeasure!
News hurtling from the City of Light has one unnamed art historian fuming that the Macca's at the Louvre plan was "the the pinnacle of exhausting consumerism, deficient gastronomy and very unpleasant odours in the context of a museum".
You can only react with awe to such a marvellous outpouring of affront. Who but a Frenchman could, in a single sentence, encapsulate such a menu of distaste?
Very unpleasant odours in the context of a museum, indeed. If only Australia, battling its obesity epidemic with earnest studies, inquiries and stern warnings to parents, had such a spokesman.
The Scots, on the other hand, are old hands at the business of black humour. Perhaps it has something to do with God granting them one of the world's most beautiful landscapes, and then giving them the English as next-door neighbours.
The new super-low beer, produced by the splendidly named BrewDog, bears the title Nanny State. It comes after BrewDog launched a beer it called Tokyo, which has a mighty alcohol content of 18.2 per cent: enough, presumably, to render insensible even those Japanese company men who spend their bleak post-work hours staggering through Tokyo's late-night streets.
With a straight face, BrewDog executives claimed this beer, which is about the strongest in the world, would help Scottish drinkers tackle their nation's battle of the binge because it would cost so much, people would drink less of it.
Unsurprisingly, the socially aware thought this was bollocks and much hue and cry followed. Alcohol Focus Scotland declared BrewDog's argument "deluded".
BrewDog's response was to brew an ale with an alcohol content of just 1.1 per cent, and then — still with a straight face — to name it Nanny State.
Somehow, we don't think they are awfully serious about selling large slabs of the stuff. The Lord only knows what BrewDog would come up with if it was based in Australia instead of Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire.
The response to the Rudd Government's tax on alcopops would, you might imagine, be rather more ironic than anything we've seen so far.
Still, we've got the good Family First senator Steve Fielding, who remains relentless about pointing out the massive social, health and economic bill of Australia's world-class addiction to booze.
Much under-reported this week was his analysis of the latest monthly retail sales figures. Senator Fielding trawled through the figures, found the section on liquor outlets and discovered that Australians spent a pretty staggering $672 million in August alone at liquor shops.
Maybe we were trying to dull our worries about the long-promised recession we never had, but the statistics mean we spent almost 20 per cent on grog this August than at the same time last year.
And if you do the maths, in the knowledge that Australia has had 22 million people since a few days ago, that means we spent $30 for every one of us, including babies, little kids and teetotallers, on booze in a single month.
Actual drinkers, you have to conclude, were fairly swilling it down. All of which means that Australians are taking the reponsible-alcohol message about as seriously as BrewDog.
What to do? Maybe if you crossed a French, art-loving gastronome with a Scottish brewer and paid him a squillion to come up with an inspired campaign urging more responsible consumption, we'd be getting somewhere.
At the very least, it would be entertaining.
First published by TheAge.com.au on October 06 2009
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