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What do you drink with your meals


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Long Island, NY.

Lately, I've been drinking Snapple Diet Lime Green Tea.

-- Jeff

"I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members." -- Groucho Marx

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Johannesburg - definitely wine with every meal, even breakfast. What's with this water with a meal business? I drink a lot of water, but actually with food when I can have wine? Goodness no! Fizzy soft drinks? Heaven forbid! I have to confess, though, that I have now, statistically speaking, only 10950 meals left, so I need to go flat out to enjoy each and every damn one of them as much as I can.

Gerhard Groenewald

www.mesamis.co.za

Wilderness

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northern nj -

depends on what pairs best with dinner. last night some pinot gris which i had used to deglaze the pan the pork chops had sauteed in. pizza, chinese, mexican - a good beer. i tend to drink seltzer, water or unsweetened iced tea before or after dinner.

Nothing is better than frying in lard.

Nothing.  Do not quote me on this.

 

Linda Ellerbee

Take Big Bites

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First of all, I think water is the universal drink and appropriate with all foods. I drink a lot of water, far more of it than wine, beer, coffee and tea combined. (Try drinking wine, beer coffee and tea combined and you'll know why.) I don't so much argue that wine, or beer, improves most foods as I do that many other drinks -- sugary ones especially -- often ruin the taste of foods for me and suggest others consider that possibility.

Clearly, many Americans enjoy pizza and cola as well as hamburgers and milkshakes. I don't dispute that taste, nor do I think it should be derided, I just think it's a taste that hampers an appreciation for other foods that I find far more interesting and rewarding. I suspect that developing a taste and appreciation for one kind of food may often hamper the ultimate appreciation for another kind of food. Substitue French, Chinese, Indian, Thai or Spanish food on either side of that. In the end, we all have to make our own decisions about what we want to eat and appreciate. All that any of us here can do is explain the decisions we've made and how they affect the way we see and taste food.

i was speaking more to the sutble assertion that all meals must somehow be special and wine-worthy. there are many reasons why even avid wine drinkers, a group of which i consider myself a part, don't drink wine with every meal.

but i respect your choices if they include wine with every meal, and if you consider every one of your meals "special." :wink:

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First of all, I think water is the universal drink and appropriate with all foods. I drink a lot of water, far more of it than wine, beer, coffee and tea combined. (Try drinking wine, beer coffee and tea combined and you'll know why.) I don't so much argue that wine, or beer, improves most foods as I do that many other drinks -- sugary ones especially -- often ruin the taste of foods for me and suggest others consider that possibility.

Clearly, many Americans enjoy pizza and cola as well as hamburgers and milkshakes. I don't dispute that taste, nor do I think it should be derided, I just think it's a taste that hampers an appreciation for other foods that I find far more interesting and rewarding. I suspect that developing a taste and appreciation for one kind of food may often hamper the ultimate appreciation for another kind of food. Substitue French, Chinese, Indian, Thai or Spanish food on either side of that. In the end, we all have to make our own decisions about what we want to eat and appreciate. All that any of us here can do is explain the decisions we've made and how they affect the way we see and taste food.

i was speaking more to the sutble assertion that all meals must somehow be special and wine-worthy. there are many reasons why even avid wine drinkers, a group of which i consider myself a part, don't drink wine with every meal.

but i respect your choices if they include wine with every meal, and if you consider every one of your meals "special." :wink:

Well I think the argument was not that the meal should be worthy of wine, but that many meals might be improved by a glass of wine. Craig raised the argument that a Bic Mac meal could be made better by a glass of beaujolais, but I rarely have wine or beer with lunch these days as it makes me sleepy. When I was in my twenties and thirties, I often enjoyed a beer or two with my lunch. Yes, my meals are special in that I try to make them as enjoyable as possible, even if it's a slice of pizza. I wish I could get a short glass of beer with a slice of pizza more often. A really nice thing about most tapas bars in Spain is that you can get a really small glass of wine or beer. In San Sebastian, and I assume in other parts of the Basque Country, one could get a zurito, which was literally a dribble of beer. It was like not much more than a half inch of beer in a glass. Our liquor laws are crazy and based on an assumption that alcohol is a vice. We haven't come very far from prohibition.

Robert Buxbaum

WorldTable

Recent WorldTable posts include: comments about reporting on Michelin stars in The NY Times, the NJ proposal to ban foie gras, Michael Ruhlman's comments in blogs about the NJ proposal and Bill Buford's New Yorker article on the Food Network.

My mailbox is full. You may contact me via worldtable.com.

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When visiting the U.S.A., we were often bemused by being served water the moment we sat down at a table. It seemed to be the 30th amendment to the constitution - that every American shall have the inalienable right to be served a glass of water! (the 28th being that every American shall have the right to an unlimited amount of ice and the 29th that every American shall have the right to immediate access to a telephone - I remember several hotel rooms with two in the bedroom, one next to the bath and one next to the loo - the mind boggles! Talking to a loved one whilst voiding the bowels!......)

We often speculated on the origins of this custom -

Teacher - "Now, children, here we have a surviving snippet of video from the 21st century. Note the family sitting down for a meal. Here comes the ritual of serving and sipping of water. Why sipping, X932?"

X932 - " If they were thirsty, they would drink, not sip, teaching person."

Teacher - "Correct! Anthropologists are still divided over the meaning of this ritual. Some feel that it was a symbolic cleansing ceremony, others that it was a homage to the pecuniary gods. Be that as it may, here follows a truly interesting scene - they are about to be served their food......"

Gerhard Groenewald

www.mesamis.co.za

Wilderness

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When visiting the U.S.A., we were often bemused by being served water the moment we sat down at a table. It seemed to be the 30th amendment to the constitution - that every American shall have the inalienable right to be served a glass of water!

It is. We do!

It actually never occured to me that water drinking was one of those "American things" we get made fun of for world wide. :unsure: What must they think of the Gatorade?

Seriously for a moment... I think it is indeed accurate to say that water is what the majority of Americans have when they eat at a "sit down" restaurant. But we eat so much "fast food" that I'm sure almost as much soda is consumed (in my experience people are rarely willing to "ask" for water at a fast food place, unless the place is clever enough to sell it in bottles). Also, getting back to the restaurant meal again, its not at all uncommon for people to order a single soda for a meal, but finish out the meal with water.

What do people drink at home? I'm not sure, but I'll bet that eGullet contains a higher percentage of wine drinkers than the public at large. IRL (in real life--meaning people NOT cruising a food board), I'd think that the most people would drink soda, the second most juice of some kind, followed by water, tea, beer and THEN wine.

Me, I'm one of those water people. I suppose I can see how to nations of wine drinkers it may seem odd, especially since we buy a good deal of that water from one of those wine drinking nations! But they drink it by the bottle, while we guzzle it by the pitcher (not the more expensive water we buy from them of course, that's for dessert).

Realistically our attitude is an outgrowth of this country's distant past, when stern-faced people who were kicked out of England for being "too strict" set up shop and discouraged drinking alcohol. Then they went away for a few hundred years while everybody else had fun, but their ghosts popped back up in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. So some laws were passed, and it became a bit more difficult to drink alcohol with every meal, since not only were there age restrictions, but also liquor licenses. Then, corporate America occurred and the age of soda began. Then people noticed that soda was bad for you, and the age of diet soda began, interspersed with occasional doses of water--when people read somewhere that you were supposed to be drinking eight glasses a day. Then Snapple came along, and people managed to somehow persuade themselves that Corn Syrup mixed with juice was healthier than Corn Syrup in soda, and it tasted better than Diet Soda. Then we all threw up our hands and started drinking whatever the hell we wanted to, except that Britney Spears really wanted us to drink Pepsi, and that was pretty persuasive for a while.

Edited by jhlurie (log)

Jon Lurie, aka "jhlurie"

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I have a hard time getting worked up about being served a glass of water, but have noticed that the practice began disappearing just about the same time as the rise in popularity of the bottled stuff. Now that "free" glass of water costs $6 or $8.

Arthur Johnson, aka "fresco"
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I will say that when I was traveling around Europe, I drank beer with almost every meal, and wine the other times. Or coffee or tea in the mornings. Why? It was cheaper or about the same price as water or coke.

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