{Wine, It’s What’s for Dinner, Part V}

According to statistics I saw recently, only 3% of Americans drink wine with their meals three times a week or more. That sucks. And it means there's an awful lot of drinking going on away from the table.

One of the biggest obstacles to healthy drinking that we face in America is we've never learned how to drink. This is due in part because we have mistakenly associated abstinence with virtue.

Of course, this is not to imply that we don't have a few problems with boozing. These problems are with the way we drink (as a sport, with intentions to get drunk), with when we drink (all at once on the weekends), with where we drink (away from home at bars), with what we drink (not wine), and with how we drink (all at one time and without food). That covers a lot of adverbs.

We could help ourselves out by not treating alcohol as something taboo, dangerous, and sinful. Rather than flatly forbid our children to drink, we could actively teach them how to drink responsibly -- which is to say, seated around the table sipping a small glass of wine with meals under parental supervision.

I've always thought that wholesale parental prohibitions on alcohol were counterproductive. Because teens know a slight buzz isn't the work of Beelzebub, these blanket prohibitions merely change the kids’ drinking venue from one of supervision and support to one charged with recklessness and danger. Rather than be denied, kids booze it up with their peers in parking lots or out in fields on the edge of town. Not surprisingly, they’re into uncovering the mystery -- a mystery that adults create.

A recent article in The New York Times detailed the results of a study on binge drinking in America. It concluded that the hotspots for teenage binge-drinking are actually rural, would-be “family values” hotbeds like Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas rather than more permissive big city environments.

Generations of unhealthy drinking have been encouraged by our collective hang-ups, superstitions, and hypocrisies. But considering the serious health risks of excessive drinking -- as well as the well-documented health benefits of moderate wine drinking (detailed in earlier posts) -- teaching Americans to drink responsibly would seem like a pretty worthwhile goal.

Changing attitudes will not come easily. But for the sake of our health and our quality of life, we should hope that such obstacles are not insurmountable. Perhaps in the not too distant future, when we have turned around our perspectives about drinking, Americans will at last come to heed the words of St Thomas Aquinas, who cautioned us some 700 years ago: “If a man abstains from wine to such an extent that he does serious harm to his nature, he will not be free from blame.”