darmi più Averna: long live alcohol that is also functional!

I cannot wait for summer again...one reason is, to drink Averna! 

This tasty Italian liquer is perfect served over a big hunk of ice with a generous slice of lemon. I drank it all last summer, and one night while at a house party I discovered another delicious way to consume it: with some chilled black coffee. Highly recommend.

I believe that functionalism will come to dominate conversations across the wellness world as the direct result of the rising popularity of meditation. Of course meditation and yoga have both been around since atleast 1785, but there has been a huge wave of meditation technologies and fancy curated meditation experiences—like Headspace, and MNDFL which now molds and are embedded into our perspective. Isn't is cool, surprising, and also kind of dystopian / freaky how technology is very literally shaping and mediating our perception of reality?

It's been said that meditation is the new frontier to sweep the west after yoga. One benefit to a meditation practice is the learned tendency to sift through and manage one's thoughts and behaviors. I’ve been thinking about this in relationship to alcohol: I don’t know that an en masse increase in mindfulness will necessarily encourage people to stop wanting to consume alcohol…(it might make some more neurotic) but I do suspect that there will be an increased interest in aperitivo, digestif, and bitters: drinks with a long history of being functional—used to aid in digestion and other natural body functions.

It makes sense to me that with meditation becoming so mainstream, there will be an increased interest in the functional benefits of alcohol, because they are useful—and people may begin developing a taste for more bitters, and herbal tinctures. As Gillian McKeith famously said, “you can train yourself to like anything,” and with products like Seedlip entering the market this is surely just the beginning.

This piece was originally published on March 23, 2017