In his wonderful book American Happiness and Its Discontents, George Will wrote that Founding Father John Adams began each day with a tankard of beer. The anecdote read as incongruous. How could Adams have been so productive in light of how his days commenced? In a subsequent conversation with the author, he underscored that the U.S. was formerly a “drinking nation,” which we both marveled at for it not mirroring the present.
This came to mind while reading Alex Epstein’s essential and excellent new book, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas – Not Less. Epstein seemed to unearth the why behind Adams’s prodigious early morning drinking: unhealthy water. As Epstein writes about a third of the way through what will now be referred to as Fossil, “Drinking water for most people at most times, has been naturally dirty and or distant.” While the idealistic among us would have us believe that the earth in its natural state produces potable water in abundance, Epstein reminds readers that “Clean drinking water, like virtually every other value, must be produced.” Adams drank produced beer out of necessity it seems. The water of the 18th century arguably would have killed him well before he reached the 19th. One guesses that if he were alive today, Adams’s days would begin without beer.
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