http://pro-libertate.net/20160612/298-read-sweetness-and-power ( )

Fascinating study by an anthropologist about sugar/sucrose- its cultivation, effect on the burgeoning capitalist economic system of England, and its role in society. A few parts dragged a bit but I confess to skimming those (useful tool skimming!). Makes an interesting partner to Sugar, Fat, Salt, published more than 20 years before that book. ( )

In this eye-opening study, Sidney Mintz shows how Europeans and Americans transformed sugar from a rare foreign luxury to a commonplace necessity of modern life, and how it changed the history of capitalism and industry. He discusses the production and consumption of sugar, and reveals how closely interwoven are sugar's origins as a "slave" crop grown in Europe's tropical colonies with is use first as an extravagant luxury for the aristocracy, then as a staple of the diet of the new industrial proletariat. Finally, he considers how sugar has altered work patterns, eating habits, and our diet in modern times.

This book was amazing! It took me nearly two years to read it, because, despite its small size, it packed a lot of information. Plus, I took a long break in between the "Power" chapter, and the final chapter, "Eating and Being." The whole book was very intense (hence the break) and made me think about food, specifically sugar, of course (that being the topic of the book), but also how our food and eating customs and traditions are formed and influenced by commerce. This includes supply-and-demand, the labor involved in producing the products, and the publicity and advertising that manufacturers of the products use to convince us we "need" this product.

Mintz traces the beginnings of sugar as an expensive product only available to the aristocracy, to the dominant position is holds in society and culture now, not only as a household staple, but as an ingredient in most pre-packaged and prepared foods. Back in the early 80's (the book was published in 1985), pretty much any processed food was guaranteed to have some form of sweetener in it, and that has probably increased since then. Sugar and sweeteners are remarkably versatile, and can add that "special something" to foods where you wouldn't expect it to appear, like fried foods. In addition, humans have a natural tendency to prefer sweetness over all other flavors, so it was only a matter of time before sugar became such a dominant force in the marketplace.

Anyway ... you should read this book if you are curious about food, because sugar or sweeteners, whether artificial or natural, are in practically everything.

This book made me wonder how much "choice" we really have, not only when it comes to selecting what we eat for snacks or meals or dessert, or what beverages we drink, but also how much of our lives are determined by forces outside our control? How can we really be sure that the choice we're making hasn't been influenced by some outside force that eludes our awareness, and therefore, our control?

Yeah. Scary. I'm going to be awake all night now ... ( )

Clearly a classic in the world of food studies, and in some ways, definitely worthy of that title. I struggled to get through this book at first--his rapid global history of sugar production bounced rapidly through time and was difficult to slog through to get to his arguments about the English working class. Once I did get there, his argument really came together, but before then, it was hard to see the point of where he was going. It should be noted that Mintz is really not all that interested in production but rather in the consumption of sugar among the English, and really among the English working class. It did its job, certainly, and I recognize how important it is as a work, but it didn't necessarily 'wow' me or make me rethink very much about how I saw the history of sugar. ( )

This is a classic in anthropology and food studies apparently. When Sidney Mintz died in December 2015 Marion Nestle dedicated that day's blog to him and this book. She said "When we polled academics working on food issues about what should be included in a Food Studies “canon”—a list of books that every student ought to master. Only one book appeared on everyone’s list: Sweetness and Power." Although I didn't formally study food science I did consider myself a food scientist during my career as a chemist with the Grain Research Lab. So I thought I should read this book. It certainly has some interesting ideas and Mintz obviously research the role sugar played in history and in modern life. However, I thought he repeated those same points far too many times.

Mintz shows how the consumption of sugar grew through the Middle Ages from something akin to a spice to a conspicuous display of wealth for the well-to-do. When Britain obtained colonies in the Caribbean the supply of sugar increased in Britain and consequently the cost decreased. Ordinary people could afford it and they particularly liked to add it to that other import, tea. Industrialization extended the use of sugar because a hot cup of highly sweetened tea was a quick stimulant that enabled the factory worker to put in more hours. Soon sugar was used as a supply of calories for children in the form of jam or treacle on a slice of bread. This was an economical and quick meal to prepare by the woman of the household who was probably also working in a factory (and perhaps so were the children). Sugar added to other foods made them more palatable (such as sugar in peanut butter which I personally detest but I am not the norm). This book was published in 1985 so it doesn't delve deeply into the place of sweetened soft drinks in the modern diet but the prevalence of them does seem to be inevitable when you follow the history.

So, I did get something out of reading this but I wouldn't really recommend it. ( )

An exploration of the role played by the cultivation and production sugar in shaping the modern world. The tall, sweet grass is a thing of power, whether as a crop, a product, or an item of consumption

In April of 2007, Sidney Mintz spoke at the Harvard University conference “Women, Men, and Food: Putting Gender on the Table.” He opened his talk with an anecdote about his most famous book, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. According to Mintz, the economic historian Carl Schorske once asked Mintz's friend, anthropologist Eric Wolf, “Isn't sugar a peculiar subject for an anthropologist?” To which Wolf replied, “Well, Mintz is a peculiar anthropologist.” Mintz said of that label that he'd “managed to live with [it] ever since.”

Peculiar seems a fitting label both for Mintz and for Sweetness and Power. Insightful and frustrating by turns, Sweetness and Power straddles the sometimes uneasy border between history and anthropology. Mintz calls himself an anthropologist with a “bias in a historical direction” and explains that the “social phenomena” with which anthropologists are so concerned “are by their nature historical.” This mindset is critical to Mintz's attempt to create what he calls an “anthropology of the present” or an “anthropology of modern life.” He hopes to ask anthropological questions about everyday life and to answer them by considering historical context. In doing this, he expands the realm of anthropological inquiry beyond the primitive and exotic societies on which it had primarily focused. He also shows that historical data can be applied to areas that historians might not have considered. This approach broadens the potential scope of both fields.

In Sweetness and Power, Mintz uses sugar as the focus of this anthropological and historical exploration. He hopes to “explain what sugar reveals about a wider world, entailing as it does a lengthy history of changing relationships among peoples, societies, and substances.” He begins by asserting that food and culture are fundamentally linked, that who we are is determined, at least in part, by what we eat. The cultural and social importance of food shows that it has meanings beyond the purely biological, and this is especially true for something like sugar which has undergone tremendous changes in production, consumption, and distribution during its long history. Mintz explains that in order to “learn the anthropology of sugar, we need to explore the meanings of its uses,” and he uses this quest to understand sugar as the framework for the rest of the book.

The first step toward this goal is exploring the historical production and consumption of sugar. Although sugar is derived from plants, it is quite different from many other food crops. Sugar cane doesn't offer up its bounty the way an apple tree or a barley plant does. The crystalline substance we call sugar is the result of a complex and difficult process. Mintz traces both the evolution of this process and its spread around the world through a series of invasions, crusades, and colonizations. He highlights the economic forces that have always been fundamental in shaping the market for sugar and controlling the means of its production. As the production of sugar spread and grew, so did its consumption. Mintz explores sugar's uses as medicine, spice, decoration, sweetener, preservative, and, eventually, as food (that is to say as a source of a significant number of calories).

These sections of Mintz's book are by far the most historically grounded. He does provide a solid history of the production and consumption of sugar and a sound exploration of the economic and political factors that influenced sugar's use. But even in these historically based sections, Mintz's anthropological roots are clear. He seeks to understand the “ritualization” of sugar and to explore the process by which “sugar uses were molded into declarative, hierarchical functions.” These issues seem of far more interest to him than the sugar taxes or production methods or political maneuvering that might be the focus in a more traditional historical work. This is not necessarily a criticism. Mintz says that his work will blur the lines between history and anthropology, but this mixture of influences does clearly shape the work.

This mixing of history and anthropology is even more obvious in Mintz's next section which focuses on power and sugar. He claims that much of sugar's power comes from its meanings, and proposes that sugar has both inside and outside meanings. Unfortunately, while intriguing, Mintz's ideas of meaning and power remain somewhat nebulous and ill-defined. The same can be said for the relationship between meaning and power. It is never clear exactly how one shapes the other. At times it almost seems like Mintz is trying to use anthropological vocabulary when talking about economic history. While this is an interesting notion, the result in this case is frustrating. Without specific definitions and clearly explained concepts the reader, at least the reader with a background in more traditional historical writing, is likely to find the argument unclear. It seems the anthropological gloss tends to lessen the clarity of the writing and, at least in this instance, and doesn't add anything above and beyond what a purely economic history would have covered.

In contrast, in the final section, the anthropological approach is an asset. It is here that Mintz's attempt to examine modern society with an anthropological approach is most successful. Perhaps it is that an anthropological tactics are simply more suited to the study of modern society and its potential future developments. Perhaps it is that Mintz is no longer trying to force an anthropological approach onto a subject better suited to a historical approach. Whatever the reason, this section presents a far more successful blending of the two disciplines than did that on power. It even raises some questions, like the growing use of high fructose corn syrup, that could benefit from exploration by historians.

The occasionally jarring juxtaposition of historical and anthropological approaches in Sweetness and Power is not the book's only flaw. It is also plagued by a consistent lack of focus. There is no single unifying thesis. Mintz doesn't have something new to tell his readers about sugar, rather he seems to want to use sugar as a lens through which to retell the last several hundred years of history. Mintz himself seems to be aware of this. He explains, “it would, of course, be immensely satisfying to be able to declare that my brooding about sugar for thirty years has resulted in some clear-cut alignment, the solution to a puzzle, the resolution of some contradiction, perhaps even a discovery. But I remain uncertain.” It sometimes seems like a collection of interesting bits and pieces of information about sugar brought together because they all shared a general subject, rather than because they all support a common theme.

Despite these criticisms, the book is certainly not without value. In his talk at Harvard, Mintz said he had two main goals for the book. The first was to “restore to the every day and commonplace its historical legacy, to let readers think about the richness of circumstance which lies behind the prosaic quality of objects and substances in daily use.” The second was to “solder together...using some single edible thing the reciprocal production and consumption that would let us see metropolis and colony, slave and proletarian, field and factory, temperate and tropical, within a single unified imperial system” and through this to “think in a more integrated manner about the history of capitalism.” Taken on these terms, the book must be seen as a success. It unquestionably takes a common commodity and historicizes it. It also demonstrates the links between different areas, communities, and systems that are so central to capitalism. However, those goals are not clear from the book alone, and not all of the book's content works towards those goals. It almost feels as thought Mintz tried to find a theme to tie his work together once the book was complete, rather than working towards it all along. Though sometimes frustrating, Sweetness and Power remains an influential work and one that has intrigued a generation of historians and and anthropologists.

I've only read bits and pieces of this one. Very informative and interesting.

Mintz provides a fascinating history of sugar, placing it in context within the transatlantic world. Sugar acquired ever increasing importance as the means for its production improved, its availability spread and its price decreased. Underpinning the success of sugar was the tragedy of slavery. Not only did slaves serve the sugar plantations and mills, but Mintz makes a compelling case for sugar's being the single key force behind the firm establishment of black slavery in the western hemisphere. ( )

Put down without finishing. It's not that it's a bad book. I'm apparently just not in the mood for academic history right now. ( )