Hot Lunch Bookshelf: The Culture Code

This book is utterly fascinating. According to the author, Clotaire Rapaille, the Culture Code is "the unconscious meaning we apply to any given thing - a car, a type of food, a relationship, even a country - via the culture we are raised." Rapaille has devised a specific method of interviewing subjects to determine Culture Codes. Usually he is commissioned by corporations to determine codes that are important to their business. For instance, Cover Girl hired him to determine the code for "beauty" in America (the book deals only with American codes).

I don't want to reveal any of the codes, but the code for "alcohol" in America is really frighening: gun. Explains Rapaille:

This Code explains the aura of danger, so puzzling to Europeans, surrounding alcohol in American culture. When we drink to excess, on some level we feel as though we are toying with a loaded gun. When we abhor drinking and driving, or frown on drunkenness, it is because we fear what can happen if the gun goes off.

And:

Americans, with their strong history of temperence (this is one of the few Western cultures ever to make consumption of alcohol illegal for all of its citizens), generally keep their children completely away from alcohol until they are well into their teens. Americans teach their children that alcohol is an intoxicant that can lead to irresponsible behavior.
Forbidden to drink alcohol as children, and learning little about it other than that it is "bad" for you, Americans end up imprinting alcohol at a rebellious age. When they gain access to alcohol (usually underage, which enhances the sense that they are doing something taboo), they know nothing of its pleasures, subtleties, or role as an enhancer of food, but they quickly discover its intoxicating qualities. Taste is unimportant. What matters is that this substance can do a job for you: it can get you drunk. As a bonus, your parents don't want you to do it, so you can rebel and get wasted at the same time...American ingenuity has even devised the most efficient way to accomplish the task: a hat that allows us to suck two cans of beer through a straw at once.

This sounds right on to me. The other codes he discusses in the book are: love, seduction, sex, beauty, fat, heath, youth, home, dinner, work, money, quality, perfection, food, shopping, luxury, America, the American presidency, and the code for America in other cultures. At 200 pages, it's a quick read and Rapaille is an accessible writer (no academic mumbo-jumbo). Highly recommended.