Time, Sugar, and Sweetness
by Sidney W. Mintz
Introduction

Anthropologists have always been
interested in the study of food and
eating (re: Mintz)

But today, there is an upsurge of
interest on the study of patterned
relationships between food and human
groups
Time, Sugar, and Sweetness

Until the 17th century people from Northern
Europe secured sweetness in food mostly
from honey and from fruit.
 Sugar can be extracted from many sources,
such as the sugar palm, the sugar beet, all
fruits, and corn (HFCS).
 The white granulated sugar familiar today is
made from sugar cane and sugar beets.
 The sugar-beet process was developed late,
but sugar-cane processing is ancient.
Time, Sugar, and Sweetness
 Sugar
cane was grown:
- in South Asia at least as early as
the 4th C B.C. & by the 8th C A.D.
around the Mediterranean
■ But it remained costly, prized, and
less a food than a medicine.
■ Those who dealt in imported
spices dealt in sugar as well.
Sugar vs Honey
Before Brittains had sugar, they had
honey.
 Honey was a common ingredient in
prescriptions and had also been used
as a preservative.
 Honey also provided the basis of some
alcohol drinks and sugar became an
important alternative to these drinks.

→ Sugar soon bested honey.
Time, Sugar, and Sweetness
 By
the 13th century English
monarchs had grown fond of sugar
imported from the Mediterranean.
 Sugar entered into the
tastes and recipe books
of the rich.
Variant Uses of Sugar
Sugar was used as a condiment to
flavor foods.
 As a medicine, it also disguised the
bitter taste of other medicines.
 It was a preservative, which, when
eaten with what it preserved, increased
its caloric content
 By 1700, was sweetening tea,
chocolate, and coffee, all of them
bitter and all of them stimulants.

Time, Sugar, and Sweetness

During the Age of Discovery, Europe
experienced a deluge of new
substances, including foods.

The sugar cane that originated in the
Old World and was diffused to the New
World and became an important crop
after the 17th century.

Sugar’s uses and the way it was
perceived changed greatly over time.
Time, Sugar, and Sweetness
 Sugar
is linked to slavery & to
economic growth: the sugar cane
plantation profits were transfered
to European banks.
 By the end of the 17th
century sugar had
become a costly English
delicacy.
Time, Sugar, and Sweetness
 The
spread of sugar through the
Western world is one of the truly
important economic & cultural
phenomena of the modern age.
 Sugar was one of the first luxuries
to become common in proletarian
diets as they filtered down from
elite tables to the working classes
that provided the labor for
industrial capitalism
Time, Sugar, and Sweetness
18-19th C. Industrialization,
sugar became a cheap source of
quick energy, forming part of a
complex of « proletarian hungerkillers »
 Factory labor required changes in
lifestyle for the new working class
 Factory-made jams & breads
(quick, high-energy foods)
replaced home-prepared food
 During
Time, Sugar, and Sweetness
«
The availability of sugar was a
function of economic & political
forces remote from consumers &
not understood as forces »
 Sugar shifted from the tables of the
elite to the proletariat, offered
calories, but no nutritional value
 Changing consumption must be seen
as a result of capitalism & class
domination
Conclusion
 Commodity Fetishism:
 Society
is divided by class interests
with unequal distribution of power
 The conceptual separation of
production & consumption and of
colony from metropolis is
unjustified—these linkages
are present in time & space