Why We Drink What We Drink
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
I’ve always paid more attention to my beverage habits than is perhaps standard. I grew up in the early 2000s in a household that much preferred juice, soda, coffee, or really anything else to water. But this was also, as my colleague Amanda Mull noted in a recent article, an era in which beverage trends were slowly shifting away from sugary drinks. When I got to college, my friends immediately noticed my strange tendencies; I’d fill up a huge glass with apple juice from our cafeteria’s soda machine and cradle it the way they were holding their Nalgenes. Finally, sometime around sophomore year, I gave water a real chance. I wish I could say I made an active decision to be healthier, but I think I just got thirsty.
Whether or not you had a quarter-life beverage crisis like I did, we all associate different drinks with different moods, needs, and even eras of our lives. Some of us, like my colleague Jacob Stern, are “cut off from a whole sector of human experience” by virtue of an aversion to a certain beverage (in his case, seltzer, but I imagine the coffee averse can empathize). Physiology, habit, and marketing, among other factors, play a role in our beverage choices. Below is a collection of Atlantic articles on why we drink what we drink.
On Beverages
By Amanda Mull
The correct number of drinks to keep at your desk
By Jacob Stern
Soda hurts me, and I’m not alone.
You’re Probably Drinking Enough Water
By Katherine J. Wu
If you’re a healthy person worried about hydration, odds are, you’re getting plenty. But no one can say exactly what the right amount is.
Still Curious?
- Drinking water is easy. Just add stuff to it. Do “water enhancers” actually enhance anything?
- You should ask a chatbot to make you a drink: AI is great at coming up with cocktail recipes, even as it fails at other tasks. Just don’t ask it to get too creative with the garnishes.
Other Diversions
- The longest relationships of our lives
- Black holes swallow everything, even the truth.
- The greatest pogo stick the world has ever seen
P.S.
In my own beverage ecosystem, Saturday morning is the time for a great cup of coffee. I hope those of you who agree with me can enjoy one while reading our happiness columnist’s ode to the “miracle bean.”
— Isabel