A Brief History of Vice: How Bad Behavior Built Civilization - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Evans is an editorial manager at Cracked.com. His articles rack up an average of sixty-four million views a year. He was a contributor to the bestselling You Might Be a Zombie and The De-Textbook.

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CHAPTER 1

Mother Nature:

History's First Bartender

The most important history lesson I ever learned startedwith a big white bucket of rotting fruit in the kitchen of my first apartment.

   I was nineteenat the time--too young to buy booze, but too old to spend my weekends sober. Itwas a conundrum. Sure, I knew people who were over twenty-one and willing tobuy me alcohol. But most of them were just as shady as you?d expect based onthe fact that they were willing to buy alcohol for teenagers. Also, I was poorenough that my options for affordable drinking were limited to six-dollarbottles of leaded vodka and, if I was really hard up, Boone's Farm.

   But a goodfriend of mine made beer in his kitchen, and he'd walked me through the basicchemistry of the fermentation process. I knew it started with yeast, theone-celled fungi that live in vast colonies, feast on sugar, and poop outalcohol. Brewers simply trapped yeast, a bunch of rotting sugary plant matter,and water in a container and let it all sit for a while until, eventually, beerhappened.

   I couldn'tafford to brew beer, though. A five-gallon batch cost upward of forty dollarsin ingredients, a fortune in teenager money. Thankfully, there was a dirtier,easier, route: I could buy a bunch of cheap fruit, mash it up, toss it into abucket with water and yeast, and let that turn into something foul butintoxicating. My friends and I called the resultant brew "hobo jug wine," andhere is the recipe we used:

Ingredients

1 five-gallon food-grade plastic bucket

1 length of hose, a finger's width or so

1 smaller bucket

Enough pineapples/oranges/apples/whatever fruit to fillup half the bucket

Instructions

    Peel and chopthe fruit and fill the bucket half full of fruit. Mash it into a pulp, and thenadd water, and cane sugar, if you feel like really taking your sobriety totask. If you're as poor as I was, you can make do with grabbing five gallons' worth of fruit juice concentrate from the grocer's freezer in lieu of honest,God-fearing fruit. Drop a packet of yeast (Fleischmann's bread yeast works justfine) into the mixture, stir, and stick the top of the bucket on.

    This nextpart's critical: Booze gives off a lot of CO2 while it's fermenting. You'llwant to make a little hole in the lid of the bucket and run the hose out of itand into the smaller bucket filled with water. That hose will let enough CO2escape that your large bucket won't explode into shards of painful plastic-yshrapnel. (If you don?t run the hose into water, you'll get some fruit bitsspewed everywhere.) Alternatively, you can buy what's known as an airlock fromyour local brew store, as well as a five-gallon plastic brew bucket with a holealready in place. Either way, let the vile brew sit for two to four weeks.

Tavia Morra

   My first batchof hobo jug wine burbled away in the kitchen for three weeks before we pulledthe top off and decanted it into bottles. I won?t pretend the brew smelledgood, but I'll remind you that I was nineteen and living in my first apartment.The smell of fermenting fruit was far from the worst odor to seep out of thatkitchen. All that mattered was that it worked. I'd crafted an alcoholicbeverage.

   It was slightlysour, a little sweet, and tasted more than a bit like bread mold. But it alsogave off the telltale burn of alcohol as it slid down my throat, and by thethird glass I was no longer sober and thus much less judgmental of the flavor.At the time, all I knew was that I'd cracked the code to being a drunk teenagerwithout any money. It was only years later, while researching this book, that Irealized my young self had inadvertently re-created something very close to thefirst booze our primate ancestors ever swigged.

Ancient Alcohol in the

Animal Kingdom

Humans aren't the only species with an appreciation foralcohol, or even the only ones with a tendency to take that appreciation toofar. In 2002, a pack of elephants (young and male, of course) tramped into avillage in Assam, India, stole a bunch of wine, and went on a violent, drunkenbender that cost six people their lives. So alcohol problems aren't unique toHomo sapiens, but we're certainly the species that's taken alcohol thefurthest.

   It's easy toimagine some starving ancient human shoveling a handful of decomposing marulafruit down his throat and, a few seconds later, realizing he felt fuckingexcellent. But the story of humankind's introduction to alcohol actually startsmuch earlier, before men or women or anything remotely human ever existed. Ourability to metabolize alcohol, and thus get drunk, originated in some of thevery first primates on earth. The enzyme ADH4 is what lets us (and gorillas andmonkeys) digest alcohol, and the variation of this enzyme that lets our speciesappreciate the ethanol in a whiskey sour first showed up around ten millionyears ago.

   This means therehave been hominids drinking much longer than there have been human beings. Theobvious question is: Why did we hold on to this adaptation? The primates who firststarted using alcohol must've been rewarded for their ability to tolerate itand their desire to seek it out. And reward in that last sentence means "theyhad lots of tiny, drunken animal sex." A casual look at your city's main dragon a Friday night illustrates the most confusing part of this story: Drunkenpeople aren't good at anything but starting fistfights, puking out of carwindows, and having trouble with their erections.

   And yet alcoholis the one drug we know our primate grand-daddies and -mommies were doingmillions of years ago. So have we always loved drinking to excess? The mostlikely answer lies in the most aptly named theory in scientific history . . .

The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis

According to the "Drunken Monkey Hypothesis," there's adamn good reason our ancestors started drinking well before the evolutionarytime line's equivalent of five P.M. The Drunken Monkey Hypothesis (yes, that?sthe real name) states that regular drinking carried substantial benefits forour adorable, furry forbearers.

   By the timefruit starts fermenting, it's gotten absolutely as ripe as it's going to get.Ripe also means "full of sugar" and thus full of calories. You need a lot ofcalories when your whole day is spent swinging from trees and fleeing fromjaguars. After all, one of alcohol's most well known side effects is the beerbelly. Beer and wine and liquor are all dense with calories. A regular drinkinghabit combined with a regular eating habit leads to a much fatter animal.Humans today aren't huge fans of all those extra calories, but that's onlybecause whole gas stations full of them assault our waistlines on an hourlybasis.

   One of the greatchallenges for any species in the wild is simply not starving to death. Whenyou can travel from points A to B only by walking or running and have to huntand gather all your food, you burn a lot more fuel just staying alive. Alcoholguaranteed our ancestors more precious, life-giving calories. The telltalescent of fermentation was an easy way for them to know when a food was at itsmost caloric. Keeping a solid buzz was enough of an advantage that our simiangreat-[X]-grandparents developed noses specifically attuned to the odor ofethanol.

   Scientists haveeven gone so far as to confirm that drinking alcohol while eating food makesyou take in more...