Yeah it’s funny that she ever mentions booze, where the markups are 200-500%. If you can use your tables and food to sell bottles of wine, you can really improve your bottom line.
There are non-drink culinary uses for it too. The wholesale banning of alcohol misses the point a lot of the time. I had a friend who taught cake decorating and it's common to mix high concentration alcohol with coloured dust to paint on sugar flowers because it's a great solvent, evaporates quickly, and doesn't soak into the sugar. No one eats this part of the cake. But in some countries with Islamic students they were so unwilling to be anywhere near alcohol they used water. Perhaps I'm mistaken but I thought the original intent of those commands was regarding intoxication (which I don't fully disagree with) so this seems odd to me.
As to your first point, highly processed foods are definitely something to watch out for. However, the effects of alcohol are immediate, and can be seen in a single sitting. Countless instances of rape, drunk driving, and homicides that come out of it. You won't see someone consume a couple of meals at a fast food place then lose his decision making ability for instance.
German here. For lunch, no one I know ever drinks alcoholic beverages (except maybe when going to a nice restaurant with the whole family on the weekend). And I don't think people are eating street food for dinner all that much, except maybe Döner. But even at Döner places, I don't think I've ever seen people drinking beer. They mostly don't drink anything, and some drink Ayran.
Do you generally sit down and drink 3 beers in one sitting?
> It would be very rare for a customer to drink 3 cokes with dinner but not uncommon for someone to order 3 beers.
At home, I drink much as I'm thirsty for, be it soda, beer, wine, tea, water... I certainly don't drink more just because it's alcoholic. I might drink less, or switch to something else, if I'm starting to feel drunk and it's not an occasion for such.
At a restaurant, I order less when alcohol is involved. I prefer to have my senses about me if I'll be driving home...
A bar would be a very different and less profitable business if they had the normal spectrum of liability other businesses have when their actions result in predictable harm. Or even if just law enforcement weren't effectively prevented from staking out bars and stopping obviously drunk patrons as soon as they started to drive.
Similarly, I also believe they'd be much less profitable if not for the rather alarming amount of addiction and abuse.
I don't think prohibition is a good idea but the fact that I'm opposed to prohibition doesn't make me blind to the externalities that bars create which are a component of their profitability.
There are lots of less than perfect things in the world. We can make them better by willing to discuss them and not being to quick to assume that any criticism is a call for a prohibition. In this case, especially, there was a comparison with other businesses and more than anything I wanted to point out that it wasn't a fair comparison because of bars unusual amount of externalized costs.