Well, it’s certainly cheaper.
It’s mostly pasta, with a vegetable (tomato) sauce, and a small amount of meat in the sauce or as meatballs added to the pasta. German food is much heavier on the meat. And meat is the most expensive part of the food.
Also, Italian food seems to be much more compatible with mass marketing, fast-food, and delivery dining.
I always ahve the same problem with German food.
It seems rather filling, but about an hour later I am always overcome with an insatiable hunger for global domination.
Didja hear about the guy who went to a German-Chinese restaurant for lunch? An hour later he was hungry for power. 
I had no idea that pre-prohibition Americans were such lushes. But since it’s pretty apparent (both now and then) that prohibition was mostly an abject failure, what caused the decline in American drinking rates? Was it just the temperance movement, or are there other causes? It seems that American consumption currently is markedly less than European consumption; if American rates hadn’t declines, would we be closer to our European counterparts?
Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way… like, look it up and don’t bother everyone else.
Anyhow, it took me a while to watch that docu… it’s great, please watch it if you haven’t.
A couple of the factors that answer your original question:
1: Christian fanatics with money thought that if alcohol was banned, then people would stop wanting to consume it. Their money was used to support State and Federal candidates (see: political whores) that voted for prohibition.
2: The women’s movement had a lot to say in support of prohibition, because their
leaders where religious fanatics too, who confused male abusive drunken behavior with their religious beliefs and thought everything bad happening to women is to blame on the Devin — or “a” Devil.
3: Politicians are whores. They always where and they will always be.
By the way, the highest consumption of alcohol per capita is not the US, it’s probably England.
Look it up 
Currently? No, I think that is wrong then. I believe Russia (& maybe other parts of the former Soviet Union) have the highest alcohol consumption.
Russian males have the lowest life expectancy, like 50’s something… and Russians in metro areas do consume way more alcohol than other people, but from a national average standpoint, I believe England has the higher rate of boozers.
Wikipedia has the answers. It confirms that yes, former Soviet states are the champions. The UK slips in farther down, after such stalwart drunks as France and South Korea.
As always when Prohibition is discussed, I feel the need to point out that the arguments which put it over the top related to military preparedness.
Alcohol wasted grain that was needed to feed troops. Alcohol wasted grain that was needed to feed our allies. (Remember those starving children in Belgium.) Drunks make lousy soldiers. Drunks make lousy workers in defense industries. German-Americans who oppose Prohibition are disloyal and serving the cause of the enemy.
Even Russia, the real drunkest place on Earth, where the government relied on its vodka monopoly as a major source of revenue, enacted Prohibition in a moment of madness after the outbreak of war in 1914.
:mad: This title should belong to the good ol’ U.S. of AA!
Ha! Not even close. The United States is 57th on that Wikipedia list, below every European country except Macedonia and Albania (high Muslim populations), as well as Norway and Iceland (too high risk of exposure to the elements?).
In fact, the non-European countries above the United States on that list are several Commonwealth nations (Australia, Canada, Guyana, Namibia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Rwanda along with its twin, Burundi, Saint Lucia, the Seychelles, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Uganda), a couple of Latin American countries (Argentina and Granada), a couple of Pacific island countries (Niue and Palau), and (for some reason) South Korea, Nepal, and Kazakhstan.
Wasn’t it Dave Barry that said the vote to pass prohibition was 7-0 in the House and 2-0 in the Senate with the rest abstaining because they were at home hungover?
This is the one caveat about that documentary. This was asserted by one historian, and she was the one most sympathetic to Prohibition. I’ve read a good deal about beer, actually, and found no one else making this claim.
To the OP: a good rundown of the Prohobitionist movement in the midwest, and especially in Wisconsin, can be found in Maureen Ogle’s Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer.
Prohibition was a product of its time. Domestic abuse was rampant, divorce rare, alcoholism was perceived to be something only immigrants had, religious self-righteousness at its apogee.
It’s important to note the Conservative movement that pushed Prohibition forward was also focused on shrinking the size of government, there was no new federal funding assigned to this new federal mandate. States were expected to arrest more people with no more resources, many local and state governments just ignored the new law altogether.
Temperance and prohibition cannot truly be described as a “conservative” movement.
Yes, I think that the posts in this very thread mention that it was a coalition of xenophobes, religious conservatives, and progressive reformers. Pretty much elements from across the political spectrum.
According to Wikipedia, Lutherans in the German tradition tended to be opposed to Prohibition while those in the Scandinavian tradition favored it. Since both groups were widely scattered through out the Upper Midwest, there must have been some crossovers both ways.
I imagine there were many who thought the abolition of the saloon would be a worthy goal, even if they themselves liked a beer in the afternoon or a shot of whiskey on cold evenings. They knew they’d still be able to get those things, somewhere.
Interestingly, when Kansas enacted state Prohibition in 1881, places like Dodge City where still very much rough-and-ready cow towns in which the hands expected to be able to tie one on Saturday nights. As far as I can tell, the famous Long Branch Saloon somehow managed to soldier on well into the prohibitory era. In a lot of places, it seems, they had the law–but those who wanted booze had that as well. A win-win outcome.
Calling the Prohibitionists “religious conservatives” is really not accurate. Prior to the 1920s, Christian fundamentalism was allied with the Progressives.
I meant to post this when it was first listed but never did. About 20 years ago PBS “American Experience” had an episode on Prohibition. One of the people interviewed was an old man who said he could remember when the law was enacted. His mother and aunts were ecstatic “Look how lucky little Johnny is. He will grew up into a world without the horrors of drunkenness that the saloon brings”. On a documentary for the “Young Indiana Jones” tv series, which had an episode where Indy and his college roommate Eliot Ness team up with Indy’s wartime friend Earnest Hemingway to investigate a murder in a club where Indy works that is owned by Johnny Torrio and has a waiter from New York named Al Capone), one historian says that prohitionists basically thought once the laws were passed, that people would basically stop drinking, or cut down severely on their own, so that enforcement would not really be necessary, or too expensive.
I will point out the first decade coincided with prosperity, “the Roaring Twenties”, “Jazz Age”,
golden era of sports with Ruth, Dempsey, Jones and Grange. And alcohol is dangerous stuff. People should not smoke but you can safely drive a vehicle after smoking a pack of cancer sticks. Try doing that after drinking a pint of whiskey and you can easily kill somebody. It is possible at first most people saw the law as beneficial and Deam Wormer was right when he said “fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life”. But the crime kept increasing, or at least got more notable with mob wars and when the Depression came, people thought about increasing jobs with legal breweries and getting tax money from legal sales.
As far as “those silly oldtimers interfering with people’s lives”, don’t we have plenty of that nowadays? limits on gambling, narcotics, fatty foods, tobacco, mandatory seat belts, motorcycle helmets mandatory most places, prostitution, “hate speech codes”. There are arguments to be made for safety/improved health vs personal freedom on both sides. But these attempts to improve people’s lives by legislation are still alive