David Clay Large's "Munich 1972"

David Clay Large is professor of history at Montana State University. He has also taught at Berkeley, Smith College, and Yale University. He is the author of several acclaimed histories, including Nazi Games: The Olympics of 1936, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich, and Berlin.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Munich 1972: Tragedy, Terror, and Triumph at the Olympic Games, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Munich 1972 addresses a perennial bugaboo of the modern Olympic movement: displays of nationalistic politics and grandstanding on the part of organizers, athletes and fans. As conceived by France’s Baron de Coubertin in the late nineteenth century, the Modern Olympics were supposed to be about individualistic athletic attainment. Yet almost immediately the Games turned into quadrennial measuring-rods of national vitality, a development that Coubertin himself unwittingly encouraged by requiring athletes to participate in the Games as members of national teams.

The organizers of the Summer Games of 1972, held in Munich, West Germany, hoped to curtail the influence of nationalism by eliminating the traditional hoisting of national banners and playing of national anthems at award ceremonies. Behind this aspiration was a desire on the part of the Munich hosts to showcase a “new” (West) Germany that was internationalist and cosmopolitan rather than nationalistic or (heaven forbid) militaristic. (We must remember that the Germans’ previous experience of Olympic hosting had been in Berlin in 1936, when Hitler had used the Games to advertise the new Nazi state. The ’72 organizers wanted their Games to be as different as possible from those of ’36.)

Much to their dismay, however, the Munich hosts quickly discovered that traditional nationalism still resonated strongly among the participating countries. This was especially true of that “other” Germany, East Germany, which would be appearing for the first time in Olympic history as a fully sovereign power, with its own national symbols. The East Germans saw Munich’s anti-nationalism crusade as an underhanded ploy to deprive East Berlin of its sovereign rights. In the end, there was no significant reduction in nationalistic display in 1972 – nor has there been any since then.

Another dimension of the Munich organizers’ effort to distinguish their Games from those of the Nazis involved a relatively lackadaisical approach to security: the “Nazi Games” might have been crawling with uniformed police and soldiers, but Munich’s “carefree” Games would be patrolled by civilian volunteers dressed in baby-blue leisure suits and armed with nothing by walkie-talkies. This downplaying of security helped set the stage for the greatest tragedy in modern Olympic history: the murder of eleven Israeli Olympians by a band of Palestinian terrorists.

Learn more about Munich 1972 at the Rowman & Littlefield website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Edward Humes's "Garbology"

Edward Humes is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 12 nonfiction books, including a trilogy of environmental works: Eco Barons, Force of Nature, and his latest, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair With Trash.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Garbology and reported the following:

On the south end of the Los Angeles Basin, with gorgeous views in all directions (smog permitting), stands a windswept mountain 500 feet tall, towering above most high-rises in L.A. and capped by a dusty plateau that could easily accommodate all of Dodger Stadium and its vast parking lot. This mountain is an immense but artificial creation, the biggest man-made structure in California -- and it is made of garbage. It contains so much trash that its inner putrescence generates enough climate-killing methane to provide power to 70,000 homes, 365 days year -- for the next 20 years.

Garbology is the story of America's collective garbage mountain and the waste-addled disposable economy that creates it. Trash has become our number one export. American communities spend more on waste management than parks and recreation, libraries, fire protection and schoolbooks. But it's not all bad news, because waste is the one big social and environmental problem anyone can do something about. Garbology is also the story of families, businesses and communities finding the way back from waste. I write about the artists in residence at San Francisco's dump (puppets built from trash reenacting The Inferno, anyone?). There's the family of four who reduced a year's worth of their non-recyclable trash to the size of a mason jar -- and cut their household expenses 40% (cool vacations, hybrid car and generous college funds, anyone?). And I write about the re-usable bag maker who says plastic grocery bags are the gateway drug to our garbage "addiction" (the average American uses 500 such bags a year, and almost none get recycled).

Page 99 of Garbology is about the trash that gets away -- the estimated 4 million tons of plastic refuse a year that never makes it to recycling or landfills and instead ends up in the ocean. In this passage, I follow the work of Project Kaisei and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography as their scientists try to figure out what impact increasingly ubiquitous bits of plastic are having on marine life, including the fish we eat.

Page 99 excerpt:

The worst part, though, the part that left her fearing for the future of pretty much everything, came during the night trawls from a sister ship on this expedition, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography’s New Horizon research vessel. That’s when the nets were set for lantern fish, those small, luminescent plankton eaters that come up from six hundred feet or even deeper waters to feed on the surface at night. These globally ubiquitous, finger-sized fish are a critical part of the food chain, with a host of variations and species that together represent an estimated 65 percent of the biomass in the ocean. Larger fish feed on the lantern fish, and bigger fish prey on them, as well as seabirds and marine mammals, and on up the food chain, right up to the fish that people eat, that civilization has harvested and relied on since there’s been something called civilization, and before that as well. That protein, that nourishment, that vast marine ecosystem—all of it depends on many trillions of healthy little lantern fish feeding on even greater numbers of tiny zooplankton.

Two Scripps scientists on the expedition team collected and dissected those fish to see what, if any, impact all that trash confetti has on them, given that some of the plastic bits are roughly the same size and shape as plankton. The researchers found more than 9 percent—nearly one in ten—of the fish had plastic in their digestive tracts. The plastic was floating right there with the plankton, and down the hatch it went.

This is bad news, but it’s unclear just how bad. It’s one thing for a percentage of fish to die from ingesting inert plastic. The problem is, the ocean receives all sorts of toxic pollutants, heavy metals and hazardous chemicals—from storm runoff, illegal dumping, sewage, ships, oil rigs and many other sources. Brittle old plastic particles can act like sponges for these toxins, becoming floating pockets of concentrated nasties.

Learn more about the book and author at Edward Humes's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Denise McCoskey's "Race: Antiquity and its Legacy"

Denise Eileen McCoskey is Associate Professor of Classics and an affiliate in Black World Studies at Miami University, Ohio. She has written extensively on the politics of race in antiquity, and in 2009 she won the American Philological Association Award for Excellence in Teaching at the College Level.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy, and reported the following:

Race: Antiquity and its Legacy provides a comprehensive introduction to race in classical antiquity. In it, I wanted to demonstrate the sheer number of contexts in which race mattered to the Greeks and Romans, allowing readers to experience the complexity of race—and the breadth and evolution of its forms—in fields as diverse as ancient racial theory, ethnography, social practice, art and literature. In addition, I link changes over time in the meanings of race to historical circumstances, such as Greece’s monumental encounter with the Persians. Notably, although ancient writers recognized a diversity of skin colors among human populations, skin color difference did not provide the foundation for ancient racial thought. The Greeks and Romans in no way considered themselves “white,” a fact overlooked in many efforts to include them in a genealogy of “white” civilization. Thus, I also trace the use (and abuse) of ancient ideas about race in more modern eras.

Given the range of topics, I hoped page 99 would feature one of my more appealing sites of analysis, such as the always-intriguing Cleopatra or the lavish Roman triumph. Instead, page 99 discussed (cringe) ancient taxation. How does such a seemingly mundane subject represent my book as a whole? Taxation actually illustrates well two major arguments: the role of context (including the tax form) in defining race and the shifting operation of race over time.

Page 99 discusses a specific tax policy undertaken in Egypt under Greek rule, one that gave financial advantages to those claiming “Greek” status. Yet “Greeks” in the tax code were defined “in ways perhaps different from our expectations: Jews and Egyptians were also able in some cases to claim ‘Greek’ tax-status” (99). While race played a distinct role in governmental policy, taxation thus established racial boundaries and their consequences in ways different from other contexts, such as social interactions or cultural display.

The tax code also changed over time, shifting its privileged category from “Greeks” to those associated with Greek practices. That occupations, such as teachers or athletes, rather than people per se received dispensation “reinforces conclusions discussed elsewhere ... namely that during the Hellenistic period, cultural practice was acquiring greater and greater authority in defining Greek identity” (99)—in other words, despite its many differences from other racial structures, tax policy followed a larger trend for redefining “Greekness” not by who you were but what you did, a trend that was accelerating in the wake of Alexander the Great’s conquests.

Read more about Race: Antiquity and Its Legacy at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Robert Burt's "In the Whirlwind"

Robert A. Burt is Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, In the Whirlwind: God and Humanity in Conflict, and reported the following:

In the Whirlwind explores the origins and justifications of God’s authority over humanity, as set out in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. Page 99 of the book [inset below left, click to enlarge] typifies its methodology: a close attention to small-seeming details in the biblical texts and sustained speculation about implicit meanings of those details as they reveal God’s claim to authority and human beings’ response to that claim. Thus immediately following page 99, questions are raised about the modesty and even apparent triviality of God’s choice to first show himself to Moses as an almost unnoticed bush and Moses’ repeated resistance to God’s injunction that he should lead the children in Israel from enslavement in Egypt.

Prior to page 99, similar use is made of narrative details. For examples: Was there a first couple created before Adam and Eve, and what happened to them? How did the forbidden tree find its way into the Garden of Eden, and why was it there? After the Flood, why did animals suddenly live “in fear and dread” of humans; and did this suggest a similar shift for similar reasons in humans’ attitude toward God? Was Abraham guilty about the death of his younger brother – reminiscent of Cain and Abel? Jumping ahead to one example from the Christian Bible: according to the various Gospels, was Jesus ever baptized?

All of these questions – and a host of others in the narratives both in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles – arise from conventionally overlooked details and all of them ultimately illuminate the basic structure, according to the biblical texts, of God’s authority and the extent of humanity’s obligation to obey God and/or to love him. This extended inquiry ultimately leads to an exploration of parallels between the biblical accounts of divine authority and accounts of secular authority in modern political theory.

Learn more about In the Whirlwind at the Harvard University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mary Alice Haddad's "Building Democracy in Japan"

Mary Alice Haddad is an Associate Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and the author of Politics and Volunteering in Japan: A Global Perspective.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Building Democracy in Japan, and reported the following:

How is democracy made real? How does an undemocratic country create new institutions and transform its polity such that democratic values and practices become integral parts of its political culture? Building Democracy in Japan tells the bottom-up story of Japan’s democratization process.

Page 99 falls in the concluding section of a chapter that explains the ways that Japan’s political institutions have experienced dramatic pro-democratic changes in the last two decades.

The reforms that they are enacting should not be seen as a mere mimicking of liberal reforms found in Western countries, however. In many ways these Japanese are reshaping the democracy that was given to them by the Allied Occupation to make it more authentically Japanese, even as they are enhancing many of its pro-democratic elements.

Contemporary Japanese politics is freer now than it was before. Political parties and politicians are more assertive, taking the initiative and challenging the bureaucracy more often and on a wider range of issues. Local governments have more autonomy to develop policies that fit their needs and tailor central government initiatives to suit the local conditions. …. Citizens and civil society organizations have been empowered. They are taking more responsibility for local as well as global problems and are demanding, and being granted, a greater say in politics. Groups are more active and more numerous than they were even a decade ago. They are claiming their rights and holding the government and its employees more accountable, both individually and collectively.

These democratic transformations have been made very carefully. They have been accomplished in ways that have preserved and even enhanced certain political values of the older generation. Although many of the reforms have championed liberal democratic ideals and practices, most of the time they have followed a political process compatible with older ways of politicking in Japan. In nearly all of the examples… reforms were initiated by elite leaders. … political efficacy came when politicians in positions of power took the issue on their own and promoted it. … In these ways, political leaders do not just reflect the ‘will of the people’ as idealized by liberal democrats; they also act as the moral guides expected by older Japanese.

The fundamental argument of Building Democracy in Japan is that democratization is a long process that involves the mutual adjustment of imported liberal democratic values, institutions, and practices with the political values, institutions, and practices that are present in the country prior to the onset of the democratization process.

Page 99 reflects that central argument well. What page 99 does not convey is the rich narratives contained in the book. The most fun and exciting aspects of the book can be found in the nuanced and often hilarious stories of communities, organizations, and individual Japanese as they struggle with transforming their political culture.

The book contains stories of how a neighborhood association chief stands up to his city government, shifting the power dynamics in his town from one where the city identifies the problem and tells the neighborhood association what to do to one where the neighborhood association identifies the problem and then tells the city government what to do. It tells the story of how the Association of New Elder Citizens’ finds ways not only to improve the health and welfare of its senior citizen members but also to reach out to children and help them learn to become good democratic citizens that contribute to a more peaceful world. It recounts the story of a young mother who decides to marry a foreigner and then quit her job rather than face the stress of combining motherhood with career, demonstrating both her increased individual power to make decisions about her own life but perhaps a reduced collective power to influence politics.

It is through these stories that we can understand how citizens make (and remake) democracy around the globe. Readers will finish the book with a much richer and more personal understanding of how Japan has democratized. The author hopes that learning more about Japan’s democratization process will also cause readers to reflect on the politics in their own countries and how they may be contributing to democracy at home.

Learn more about Building Democracy in Japan at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christian McWhirter's "Battle Hymns"

Christian McWhirter is assistant editor for the Papers of Abraham Lincoln in Washington, D.C.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War, and reported the following:

From Page 98:

No wartime event inspired a greater number of political songs than the northern presidential election of 1864. This fierce affair pit Lincoln, emancipation, and the Republicans against George McClellan and the peace Democrats - sometimes called Copperheads. Campaign music had become less effective in the 1850s, but it returned to center stage in 1864 because of the intense opinions and emotions generated by the war. Although many of these songs seem trite or laughable, they helped cement the public persona of each candidate and explored the issues of the war in an accessible way.

I suppose my book fails the Page 99 Test because the eponymous page mostly features an illustration but I'll bend the rules and discuss this paragraph from page 98 instead.

The introduction to my discussion of music’s role in the election of 1864 encapsulates many of the book's central themes. Both Democrats and Republicans understood that music was an extremely effective way to share their party's ideas and influence listeners. Democrats tended to focus on race and emancipation in their songs because these issues provided the starkest contrast with Republicans. On the other hand, Abraham Lincoln's supporters crafted fewer original songs. Instead, they leaned heavily on already popular tunes that supported Republican positions, especially "The Battle Cry of Freedom" and "John Brown's Body."

By using music to express their views of the war and shape the opinions of their listeners, Republicans and Democrats participated in a phenomenon that took place in every facet of American society. During the Civil War, music was one of the best ways to spread ideas quickly and effectively - and both northerners and southerners did not hesitate to do so. As a result, the war inspired a veritable flood of professional and amateur music that was used by a variety of Americans in a variety of ways.

Those songs that captured the public's attention early in the war achieved incredible popularity and remained favourites for years, especially those with political overtones such as “Dixie” and “John Brown’s Body.” However, without radio to provide definitive renditions of these pieces, revision and interpretation never ceased. Americans did not just appropriate songs to their specific causes but frequently revised and recast them to better suit their sentiments. One of the war's most enduring pieces, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," was a result of this process; as Julia Ward Howe refashioned "John Brown's Body" to better fit her ideal vision of the northern cause. Democrats and Republicans made heavy use of music in 1864 precisely because it had been used so well and so often during the previous three years of war.

Learn more about Battle Hymns at the University of North Carolina Press website, and visit the Battle Hymns Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ginger Strand's "Killer on the Road"

Ginger Strand is the author of Inventing Niagara, a Border’s Original Voices choice, and Flight, a novel. Her nonfiction has appeared in many places, including Harper's, OnEarth, The Believer, and Orion, where she is a contributing editor. She grew up mostly in Michigan and now lives in New York City, but spends a lot of time on the road.

Strand applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Killer on the Road: Violence and the American Interstate, and reported the following:

On page 99 of Killer on the Road, the most typical thing is the section break. I am addicted to section breaks. This is because I seem to be pathologically unable to go easy on myself and follow a single narrative thread. The entire book is symptomatic; it tells the entwined stories of the interstate highways and the serial killers who haunted them.

Chapter Three, in which page 99 falls, traces the Atlanta child murders of the late 1970s. Around thirty children (numbers differ), all of them black, most of them poor, were abducted and murdered in a few short years, during which the black community lived in fear. The story of those kids unfolds in the context of what the interstate highway system did to Atlanta, which was extreme. The murdered kids lived in a landscape that had been transformed by the interstate highway program and urban renewal. They lived in the same drab housing projects, played in the same dirty streets, disappeared from the same low-end shopping plazas, and turned up dead in the same abandoned lots and empty right-of-ways.

On page 99 itself, we see a family called the Bells being forced out of their home and into a public housing project by transit construction. Then, after the section break, we see how, across the new interstate, Atlanta was rebuilding its downtown into a shining beacon of commerce. The former black neighborhood of Lightning was demolished for hotels, office towers, shopping centers and a trade show complex, all of it walled off from the public housing nearby. A few years later, nine-year-old Joseph Bell would disappear, only to be found strangled in an abandoned school two weeks later. He was only one mile—but an entire world—away from the new Atlanta, the “city too busy to hate.”

Learn more about the book and author at Ginger Strand's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Daniel Lewis's "The Feathery Tribe"

Daniel Lewis is the Dibner Senior Curator of the History of Science and Technology and the Chief Curator of Manuscripts at The Huntington Library in San Marino, CA.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Feathery Tribe: Robert Ridgway and the Modern Study of Birds, and reported the following:

My book The Feathery Tribe examines the collisions between two contentious and passionate groups: scientists and amateurs studying birds in the late nineteenth century, and reporting on it through their writings in very different ways to very different audiences. My page 99 [below left, click to enlarge] describes the struggles between two factions that published birdy magazines: the Auk, published by the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) and the Ornithologist and Oologist, issued by a citizen named Joseph M. Wade. The founders of the AOU and Wade couldn’t have been more different, in both their language and their intent, although they were both writing about the same feathery creatures.

The Auk was much concerned with the scientific names of things, and AOU founding member and office Elliott Coues would propose in 1884 a new system of names for names. “The word onym [the tenable technical name of a species or other group in zoology] supplies the desiderata of brevity in writing, euphony in speaking, plastic aptitude for combinations, and exactitude of signification,” he wrote about one of his proposed terms. Wade’s O & O, by contrast, was about different things. That same year he would issue a piece by the title “Gastro-oology,” which detailed the virtues of eating the insides of eggs collected. (“Barbarous, you say,” asked Wade rhetorically. “Well, try a little savagery yourself.”) The two groups had dramatically different goals and readers.

A number of members of the “feathery tribe” worked to sort out these issues of nomenclature, and many of them collided with Wade’s more populist approach. Wade himself took issue with the Auk’s attitude about names and descriptions of birds, and with what many of its readers considered to be an overly scientific tack, not accessible to the masses of bird-lovers. If the AOU was the relatively dry, scientific side of birds in the public’s eye, Wade’s magazine was grist for the fantasies for thousands of Americans, who had a fascination with their own private collections, as well as those using birds and their feathers for clothing, room decorations, and other aesthetic uses. Wade’s primary goal was to promote birds to as wide an audience as possible: “My Idea has always been to popularize ornithology and avoid the Dry Sciences as much as possible,” he wrote to AOU member Ernest Ingersoll. “It can be made palatable to the Million[s]—at least I am not yet satisfied otherwise.”

For their part, the AOU officers found Wade to be insolent in the extreme – and perhaps none more than the arrogant and brilliant Coues. Upon getting wind of a rumor that Wade was planning to criticize the AOU in print in 1884, the earthy Coues hissed to a colleague, “Do you really mean to say that that vulgar crank is going to attack the A.O.U. in his contemptible little sheet? Is he a fool? Has he declined his election [as an associate member of the AOU, just on the verge of being founded]? I hope he is ass enough to accept it, and then abuse the Union! It would be just like him! He may do so, as the parting whiff from the moribund sheet, and a sweet smell too. Didn’t I foresee a scent in that quarter?”

But the technical use of language carried the day for scientists. One word or phrase, no matter how technical, can be pregnant with meaning that would otherwise require many words to describe. It is useful because it is simultaneously compact and descriptively rich. Relatively obscure words and phrases in science, medicine and technology conveyed (and still convey) a great deal of meaning. In the words of rhetorician John Battaglio, “these forms of words became a powerful means to condense information, convert events into objects, and minimize negotiation of ideas, thereby giving scientific writing a privileged position.” Science is not literature, as Ridgway himself once noted, and a Rosa banksiae lutea by any other name would not smell nearly as sweet.

Learn more about The Feathery Tribe at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mara Einstein's "Compassion, Inc."

Mara Einstein is Associate Professor of Media Studies at Queens College. She is the author of Brands of Faith: Marketing Religion in a Commercial Age. She has worked as a senior marketing executive in both broadcast and cable television as well as at major advertising agencies.

Einstein applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Compassion, Inc.: How Corporate America Blurs the Line between What We Buy, Who We Are, and Those We Help, and reported the following:

My intention with this book is to shine a spotlight on the downside of cause marketing, the strategy of using charities (and their associated celebrities) as a means to sell consumer products. Cause marketing—pink ribbons, red dresses, greenwashing, and so on—is detrimental to our culture because it distorts how we think about charity and those in need, and disguises how institutions like governments and corporations are abdicating their responsibility in caring for the community at large.

As important, is my wish to advocate for those who are “getting it right.” That’s where Page 99 comes in. Leading up to this page, the book is discussing what I call hypercharities (Susan G. Komen for the Cure, Feeding America, and so on) as well as a number of celebrities who have used charities for self-aggrandizement (Donald Trump and Celebrity Apprentice). Page 99 presents the work of Stephen Colbert—funny man and philanthropist:

In June 2009, Stephen Colbert and his merry troupe from Comedy Central moved “The Colbert Report” to Camp Victory, Iraq. The “mission” was named “Operation Iraqi Stephen: Going Commando,” and entailed taping and broadcasting the show for one week from amidst American troops fighting overseas.
…
Anyone who has watched this program is aware that the host is an unabashed supporter of American troops. He helped raise money for the troops through multiple methods during his “stunt” week, all with the Colbert spin. Viewers could provide money to help get school supplies for children of soldiers through donorschoose.org (an organization that helps all schools not just military ones), buy Colbert’s WristStrong bracelets (a takeoff on Livestrong), with the proceeds going to the Yellow Ribbon Fund, helping injured veterans; or download episodes of the show from iTunes.

Does Colbert get something out of this? Definitely…. Even so, in this case, who benefits? Net-net, you would have to say the troops and their families. They get attention and money, and awareness is raised for charities that benefit them. Moreover, Colbert is not asking you to buy anything (except his WristStrong bracelet) but rather to donate money directly.”

Direct donation is better for charities than buying something with a pink ribbon on it and hoping the money will go to breast cancer, or buying a bottle of dishwashing liquid and thinking you’ve helped save the sea lions. That is because cause marketing purchases are often more effective in putting money in the pocket of consumer product companies than they are in making the world a better place. Compassion, Inc. provides the reader with information about how cause marketing works, and how not to be duped by their misleading appeals.

Learn more about the book and author at the Compassion, Inc. blog and Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marion Nestle & Malden Nesheim, "Why Calories Count"

Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health and Professor of Sociology at New York University. She is the author of What to Eat, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety, and Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine. Malden Nesheim is Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell University. He is coauthor (with Marion Nestle) of Feed Your Pet Right: The Authoritative Guide to Feeding Your Dog and Cat and (with Ann L. Yaktine) of the Institute of Medicine report Seafood Choices: Balancing Benefits and Risks.

Nestle applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, and reported the following:

Why Calories Count is about everything my co-author, Malden Nesheim, and I could think of that is related to calories: how they were discovered, how you measure them in food and in the body, how many you need and why, what happens when you have too few, and what happens when you have too many. We also included the way calories are used in society: diets and dieting, labeling, and how the entire food system is set up to encourage people to eat more calories, not fewer.

Calories in food come from the digestion and metabolism of only four components: proteins, fats, carbohydrates—and alcohol. Most books about nutrition, diets, and health forget about alcohol, but that’s a mistake. As the USDA scientist Wilbur Atwater meticulously measured in the late 1800s, the metabolism of alcohol yields 7 calories per gram or 100 calories per standard size drink. Alcohol provides more calories than either protein or carbohydrate, and almost as many as fat. That’s what the science tells us.

Politics explains why alcohol calories are such a well kept secret. They rarely appear on the labels of alcoholic beverages because they do not have to. Alcohol labels are not regulated by the FDA and do not display Nutrition Facts. For reasons of history—remember Prohibition?—alcoholic beverages are regulated by the Treasury Department, which gets more revenue if people drink more.

Page 99 comes in the middle of a short chapter on the secret calories in alcohol and what you have to do to figure out how many your drinks might contain.

Page 99:

If you drink light beer, the labels do the calorie-counting work for you. The label of Pennsylvania’s Yuengling Light Lager, for instance, gives an average analysis: 99 calories, 8.5 grams carbohydrates, 0.82 grams protein, and 0.1 grams fat. Forget about the protein and fat. Their calories are negligible. As with any “light” beer, a standard serving provides about 100 calories. But how much alcohol does it contain? You can figure this out by subtracting the minimal calories from protein, fat, and carbohydrate and working backward with the formula, but why bother? This is a light beer, and its percent alcohol will be closer to 4 percent than to 10 percent.

Nutrition advocacy groups have complained for years about the confusing and uninformative labeling of alcohol beverages and have pressed for a more rational system for displaying the content of alcohol, calories, and ingredients. But their efforts to date have not succeeded, as we explain in chapter 24.

Do Alcohol Calories Count?

Yes, they do. But if anything about alcohol calories can still be considered perplexing, it is surely the way they are metabolized in the body. Alcohol is not changed by digestion. It is absorbed into the body intact, where it goes straight to the liver. There enzymes convert it to acetaldehyde, a potentially toxic substance thought to be responsible for much of the damage to the liver, heart, and other organs seen so frequently in “heavy drinkers” who habitually drink too much alcohol.

Unlike the way other energy-producing molecules in food are used in the body, how alcohol is metabolized depends greatly on the amount consumed. People who drink small amounts of alcoholic beverages readily metabolize acetaldehyde to acetate. Acetate enters normal energy-yielding metabolic pathways and ends up excreted as carbon dioxide and water or, if calories are in excess, stored as body fat. Large amounts of alcohol, however, increase the deposition of fat in the liver and overcome the body’s ability to metabolize acetaldehyde. This substance accumulates and causes damage, especially to the liver and the heart. People vary greatly in the rates at which they metabolize alcohol, which is why it affects different people in such different ways.

These differences may explain why alcohol calories do not affect everyone’s body weight in the same way. People who drink large amounts of alcohol are not necessarily more obese than nondrinkers and often display relatively lower body weights.

Learn more about the book at Marion Nestle's website.

The Page 99 Test: Marion Nestle's Pet Food Politics.

--Marshal Zeringue