Jealous for a Scoop!

Source

Quote A:

In a column at the end of October, New York Times restaurant critic Frank Bruni looked down his nose at Four Loko, a fruity, bubbly, brightly colored malt beverage with a lower alcohol content than Chardonnay and less caffeine per ounce than Red Bull. “It’s a malt liquor in confectionery drag,” Bruni wrote, “not only raising questions about the marketing strategy behind it but also serving as the clearest possible reminder that many drinkers aren’t seeking any particular culinary or aesthetic enjoyment. They’re taking a drug. The more festively it’s dressed and the more vacuously it goes down, the better.”

Less than two weeks after Bruni panned Four Loko and its déclassé drinkers, he wrote admiringly of the “ambition and thought” reflected in hoity-toity coffee cocktails offered by the Randolph at Broome, a boutique bar in downtown Manhattan. He conceded that “there is a long if not entirely glorious history of caffeine and alcohol joining forces, of whiskey or liqueurs poured into after-dinner coffee by adults looking for the same sort of effect that Four Loko fans seek: an extension of the night without a surrender of the buzz.”

Quote B:

What made this particular formulation intolerable—indeed “adulterated,” according to the FDA—was not its chemical composition but its class connotations: the wild and crazy name, the garish packaging, the low cost, the eight color-coded flavors, and the drink’s popularity among young partiers who see “blackout in a can” as a recommendation. Those attributes made Four Loko offensive to the guardians of public health and morals in a way that Irish coffee, rum and cola, and even Red Bull and vodka never were.

Ah, I guess so. And Gilbert Keith Chesterton pointed out that in Prohibitionist mentality decades ago, when talking about Prohibition in America. As well as in his satiric novel The Flying Inn.

Ah, an armchair commentator like me can't have all the scoops! Creds to Jacob Sullum!

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Audoux,Paris III
15-II-2011, Feast of
St Claude La Colombière