41 Amy Stewart - The Science Behind the World's Alcohol

Inquiring Minds

Science, Society & Culture, Neuroscience, Female Host, Interview, Social Sciences, Critical Thinking

4.4 • 848 Ratings

🗓️ 4 July 2014

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's the 4th of July, and you love your country. Your likely next step: Fire off some small scale explosives, and drink a lot of beer.But that last word ought to trouble you a little. Beer? Is that really the best you can do? Isn't it a little, er, uncreative?Amy Stewart, our guest this week, has some better ideas for you. Author of the New York Times bestselling book The Drunken Botanist: The Plants That Create The World's Great Drinks, she's a master of the wild diversity of ways in which, since time immemorial, human civilizations (virtually all of them) have created alcoholic drinks from the sugars of their native plants.It seems human beings pretty much always find a way when it comes to getting hammered. Indeed, when you think about it, you can argue that learning how to do so was one of the first human sciences. In a sense, it's closely akin to capturing and using solar energy: Making alcohol, too, hinges upon tapping into the power created by the sun. "It is not much of an exaggeration to claim that the very process that gives us the raw ingredients for brandy and beer is the same one that sustains life on the planet," writes Stewart in The Drunken Botanist.This episode also features a conversation with Mother Jones reporter Molly Redden about how the Supreme Court flubbed reproductive health science in the Hobby Lobby case, and of Facebook's troubling recent study that involved trying to alter users' emotional states.iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/inquiring-minds/id711675943RSS: feeds.feedburner.com/inquiring-mindsStitcher: stitcher.com/podcast/inquiring-mindsSupport the show: https://www.patreon.com/inquiringminds

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's Friday, July 4th, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.
0:05.6	I'm Chris Mooney.
0:06.5	And I'm Indravis Gontas.
0:07.8	Each week we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.
0:12.9	We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.
0:17.2	You can find us on Twitter at Inquiring Show on Facebook at slash Inquiring Minds podcast,
0:23.3	and you can subscribe to the show on iTunes, Stitcher, Swell, or any other podcasting app.
0:34.4	We all know the expression, I need a drink. It's something we say to ourselves after every
0:40.7	episode of inquiring minds, right? Only if we then have to listen to ourselves. Right. And it's
0:46.8	something that millions of people are going to be saying slash doing this 4th of July weekend.
0:53.8	So our society does all this drinking for better and sometimes for
0:58.4	worse. But I don't think people think much about the science that makes it all possible. I mean,
1:03.5	the fact is that the sun is ultimately kind of the source of all our alcohol because it feeds into
1:08.3	plant photosynthesis. That makes the sugars that the plants
1:11.6	produce. And then we use those sugars to make booze with the help of some little friends
1:16.3	called yeast who convert that sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide. So around the world,
1:22.1	since time immemorial, cultures have figured out how to do this using their own native plants
1:27.1	from exploiting the
1:28.6	agave plant, which they do in Central America to make tequila and mascal, to using corn to make
1:34.4	whiskey, to using trees to make things like spruce beer. Humans are pretty ingenious booze makers,
1:40.7	as well as ingenious boozers. And this week's guest is the expert on that. She's Amy Stewart,
1:46.2	author of The New York Times bestseller, The Drunken Botanist, The Plants That Create the World's
	...

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