>I found out today that ethanol reacts with organic fats (carboxylics only?) to form esters, which do not appear to act like ethanol in the body.

An alcohol can form an ester with a carboxylic acid, such as a fatty acid. Ethanol is obviously an alcohol, so that can happen under the right circumstances.

Thing is, when you're talking about fat, usually you're talking about triglycerides or maybe phospholipids etc. In those cases, the fatty acids have already formed an ester with an alcohol. It just isn't ethanol, but instead glycerol. So there's nowhere for ethanol to "attack".

In the process of digestion, those esters in dietary fat are actually broken down by enzymes, but those same enzymes would also immediately break any esters that ethanol might try to form.

In any case, the reaction conditions to form an ester aren't really there in the human body (except when aided by enzymes).