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Watering Down: Difference between revisions
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** This was also done DELIBERATELY by the government to prevent industrial alcohol from getting consumed. This worked as well as you might expect: [http://www.slate.com/id/2245188 not]. Contemporary comments to this were: "The government is under no obligation to furnish the people with alcohol that is drinkable, when the Constitution prohibits it. The person who drinks this alcohol is a deliberate suicide." and "If the Senator's theory is that alcohol is so poisonous, then why put poison in it?" (the second quote is not a response to the first one).
* The British Royal Navy served "grog" to its sailors. You could call it watered-down rum, but it's more like rummed-up water, and the main point was that the alcohol would keep the water drinkable. This was also done to moderate the sailors' drinking. The daily ration wasn't enough to get really soused anyway, but issuing it watered down discouraged sailors from hoarding up their rations and going on a bender.
* Rationing in [[World War II]] led to this -- in more ways than one. During the siege of Leningrad, the food situation got so precarious that the Soviets started issuing bread filled out with ''sawdust'', and the Germans themselves would later give the foodstuff to
* More Truth In Television, and perhaps an inversion: A very minute portion of alcohol was always added to water in ancient societies to make it safe(r) to drink. (Even the Apostle Paul, otherwise rather famous for being an ascetic, recommends this in a letter to Timothy because the other had been having stomach problems.)
* This was done with milk and even bread depressingly often. (Milk would be mixed with water, bread with chalk, plaster, grit and worse...) There's an incredible amount of legislation on this in older legal systems, often putting it on the same severity scale as theft and murder. Because, well, it kind of ''is'' murder to sell someone "food" with the nutritional value of cardboard.
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