Trop De Chefs, Pas Assez d’Indiens

I entered the super­mar­ket and looked around. Some­thing was miss­ing. The frozen food sec­tion was big­ger than ever, the aisle end dis­play prod­ucts were scream­ing “buy me!” and peo­ple were massed around the “back to school” aisles. Noth­ing weird here. Yet, I couldn’t find what I was look­ing for.

I finally came to my sense before embar­rass­ing myself by ask­ing the stu­pid ques­tion. Of course I wouldn’t find wine in a super­mar­ket. I was in Ontario!

In my defense, I have to say I don’t drink. So when I was asked to bring some wine to a din­ner I was going to, I headed to the super­mar­ket. Of course. I’d have done that in France. But this is North Amer­ica, the con­ti­nent where bot­tles of alco­hol are put into a brown bag or an opaque plas­tic bag, where you have to show an ID to buy booze if you can at all, and where you can only go to des­ig­nated places to sat­isfy your habit (or gourmet addic­tion if you pre­fer). Wow.

I grew up in Nantes, a fairly large city stuck between the Atlantic Ocean and the Loire River. It’s nei­ther Cham­pagne nor Bor­deaux but it has a lot of vine­yards. And it’s close to Brit­tany, which is a big drink­ing coun­try and trust me, not only of water. Most of my friend learned to drink with their par­ents. It starts at 5 years old, where you fin­ish glasses of wine at wed­ding or spe­cial events. By the time you’re ten, you can make the dif­fer­ence between a Chardon­nay and a Sauvi­gnon. Between 14 and 25, you hang out in bars, dis­cos and par­ties and per­fect your expe­ri­ence with spirits.

Binge drink­ing used to be rare. The legal drink­ing age in France is 14 years old to buy beer (beer isn’t alco­hol, right?), 16 years old for wine (wine is cul­tural, right?) and 18 years old to buy dis­tilled alco­holic bev­er­ages (kids can wait for these strong shit from the Eng­lish world… right?). There’s no min­i­mum age for drink­ing in pri­vate. Of course. Added to the fact that legal stip­u­la­tions placed on the pur­chase and con­sump­tion of alco­hol are merely tech­ni­cal­i­ties to which almost no one adheres, there’s very lit­tle enforce­ment of the legal drink­ing age. As a mat­ter of fact, I had to research legal drink­ing age for France because I couldn’t remem­ber we had one. Drink­ing is not an issue. It’s a national tradition.

So what hap­pens in a coun­try where buy­ing booze is as easy as dri­ving (or walk­ing… remem­ber, you’re 14) to the near­est gas sta­tion or super­mar­ket? I mean, you can actu­ally buy beer in McDon­alds to go with your fries (and not eat the fries—we do have a healthy mind if not a healthy body). And in a coun­try where there’s no legal drink­ing age? Well, not much I’m afraid.

Drink­ing is just not a rite of pas­sage. We have plenty of these: to get a dri­ver license (at 18), to obtain the high school diploma and yes, to have sex for the first time. But drink­ing? Nah. Sure, there must be a peak in par­ty­ing and wak­ing up the neigh­bours in the mid­dle of the night around the first year of uni­ver­sity but every­one has been drunk at least once way before that.

There­fore, French have a hard time under­stand­ing the con­cepts of fake ID’s, under­age drink­ing and all the tricks north-American kids have to pull out in order to get a few bot­tles of the pre­cious bev­er­age. A lot of movies revolve around this idea though… Like the movie Super­bad I saw last week. I don’t really get it to be hon­est, although I’m sure it’s par­tially for show and that kids don’t really wait to be 18, 19 or 21 to get wasted.

As for myself, as a true rebel, I didn’t feel like expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing legal and wide­spread. On top of that, I find beer way to bit­ter, wine too expen­sive and cock­tails too sweet. I just stick to mint tea, grape­fruit juice and Diet Coke. Call me bor­ing if you want—I don’t care.

Do I think the way French han­dle drinks is stu­pid? Well, kind of. I mean, sure kids don’t go crazy once they turn 21 years old and yes, wine is a national thing but drunk-driving is way to com­mon and alco­hol is so com­mon­place that not drink­ing isn’t nor­mal. And a lot of peo­ple drink way too much… but the nation is in a state of denial even though alco­hol is the third great­est cause of avoid­able deaths in France.

But on the other side, North Amer­i­can soci­ety some­times makes me raise an eye­brow. A soci­ety where kids are allowed to drive, own a gun (yes, it is a stereotype!)Vote and go to war before being allowed to drink? A place where peo­ple smoke 9 meters from build­ing doors but hap­pily eat trans-fat prod­ucts? A place where they are two gyms in every block… along with three McDon­alds and five Burger Kings? Surely, Euro­pean and Amer­i­cans have dif­fer­ent con­cern about health. French hap­pily indulge them­selves and don’t feel guilty about it (it’s cul­tural, it’s a per­sonal choice, it’s the way we’ve always done it) whereas North Amer­i­cans tend to be health freaks but don’t nec­es­sar­ily do things right when it comes to pub­lic health.

Mean­while, I can’t help won­der­ing whether there’s a happy medium between mak­ing alco­hol a for­bid­den fruit and suck­ing up your first drink at age 5. Must be. Somewhere.

Related posts:

1. Cig­a­rettes And Creationism
2. The Food Saga: The Drinks
3. Diddly-Ho, Neighbor-ino
4. Cana­dian Souvenirs
5. Drink­ing In Rennes