She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition, and reported the following:
Page 99 gives readers a good sense of the varied ways alcoholic beverage producers attempted to destigmatize alcohol and enhance the industry’s public image after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. It analyzes the advertising and public relations campaign that Edward Bernays, a pioneering public relations authority, developed in the late 1930s for the United Brewers’ Industrial Foundation (UBIF), a brewing industry trade association. Designed to appeal to housewives and rural voters—the two groups most likely to support alcohol bans in local option elections—the campaign promotedLearn more about Intoxicating Pleasures at the University of California Press website.beer as a food and a source of culinary adventure, partly with the goal of getting housewives to view beer as many brewers did: not as an intoxicating beverage but as a ‘liquid food’ that belonged in the pantry ‘alongside the bread and other foodstuffs.’…UBIF advertisements touted beer as “Nature’s Liquid Food” and celebrated the farmers who supplied grains for consumers’ bread and beer. Bernays hired home economists to write recipe booklets that used beer to flavor both savory dishes (beer bread, beer-based cheese sauces) and sweet dishes (chocolate beer cake, sweet potatoes baked in beer). By leaning into beer cookery and the liquid food metaphor, the UBIF campaign, I argue, aimed to “[anchor] beer more firmly to the food side of the food-drug divide.” The strategy had “distinct political upsides: it kept beer taxes low and allowed beer to be sold in delis and grocery stores,” where sales of wine and spirits were prohibited.
The brewers’ revival of the liquid food argument was both surprising and risky. Not only had the argument failed to gain traction during the crusade for national Prohibition, but it likely only further antagonized brewers’ opponents. Consider the trade card advertisement that one Detroit brewer created in 1883 to advance the anti-prohibitionist cause. The color lithograph featured a cherubic toddler seated in a high chair, with a beer mug in hand, and the accompanying jingle left little doubt about the source of the babe’s cheerful disposition: ‘the youngster ruddy with good cheer, serenely sips his Lager Beer’ (see Figure 5).…
Despite obvious political risks, the UBIF campaign loudly trumpeted the liquid food metaphor.
Page 99 offers a surprisingly good preview of several themes in the book. First, the creation of the UBIF campaign, motivated in part by the resurgence of prohibitionist sentiment among women and rural voters, underscores the continued vulnerability of the alcoholic beverage industry after Prohibition. Second, page 99 reveals how the alcoholic beverage industry pinned its hopes for rehabilitation on winning women to their side. Public relations experts, marketing authorities, and trade associations all recognized that women had enormous control over the industry’s fortunes both as voters who could sway the outcome in local option elections and as the gatekeepers who decided how much and what kind of alcohol entered the home. The UBIF courted women’s consumer and political loyalty by hiring other women —home economists, cookbook authors—to demonstrate how beer could be safely integrated into the home as a beverage and as a cooking aid. By emphasizing beer’s place in the American home, the UBIF campaign also aimed to distance beer from the disrepute of the saloon—a strategy that brewers deployed with even greater sophistication during World War II. Finally, page 99 introduces the idea that alcohol producers attempted transform previously illicit substances into ordinary pleasures by placing intoxicants on the same moral plane as food. For centuries many cultures had viewed beer and wine as foods rather than drugs, but this trend began to reverse itself in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the mass production and distribution of spirits increased the prevalence of drunkenness and crime. Societies with strong temperance movements exiled spirits—along with beer and wine—from the category of food and reclassified them as drugs that merited strict regulation. In other chapters, readers will learn how the 1939 world’s fairs and food crusades launched during World War II created new opportunities for brewers, vintners, and distillers to narrow the food-drug divide. Clever readers of page 99 may intuit that wine, beer, and whiskey followed parallel and divergent paths in their quest for respectability and regulatory favor.
--Marshal Zeringue