Grocery

Sweetness and power

sugar

Year: 1985

Type: academic/popular book

Author: Sidney Mintz (website

Full reference: Sidney Mintz (1985) Sweetness and power: the place of sugar in modern history. Harmondsworth: Penguin

Availability: from the publisher (US$16), amazon.com (paperback US$8.76, hardback US$106.99) amazon.co.uk (paperback £3.95, hardback £124.03)

Page reference: Bedejo, A., Korijn, J. & Rahlin, A. (2012) Sweetness & power. followthethings.com (www.followthethings.com/sweetnessandpower.shtml last accessed <insert date here>)

Descriptions

This book explores the introduction of sugar onto the European continent, and sugar’s transformation from a luxury item to a staple of modern life. It is not a history book by any means, although history is a large part of it (Source: Wemisse 2010 np link).

At its most direct and lucid, Sweetness and Power provides convincing evidence that the things we think about least affect us the most -- that by comparison with what we eat, what we grow, what we wear, the actions of presidents and princes are merely evanescent (Source: Yardley 1985 3).

Sweetness and Power first appeared in 1985. It was a splendidly subversive account of the way in which sugar has altered our lives: The first cup of hot tea drunk by a British worker was a significant historical event because it prefigured the transformation of an entire society, a total remaking of its economic and social basis (Source: Cooper 1996 5).

But why did the Chinese not use sugar in their tea – or, indeed, Europeans when tea was first introduced to them in the seventeenth century? The answer given is that Europe developed a ‘sweet tooth’. A metaphor is not an explanation... Mintz suggests some hypotheses, but essentially avoids the issue by stating that ‘documentation for the custom of adding sugar to these beverages [tea, coffee and chocolate] during the early period of their use in the United Kingdom is almost nonexistent’ (source: Smith 1992 259-260).

Mintz cites fashion and imitation as mechanisms expanding sugar consumption, but his emphasis on the functional analysis of the uses of sugar (as condiment, sweetner (sic), and so forth) may give insufficient scope to the meanings of sugar for contemporaries (Source: Smith 1992 265).

In Sweetness and Power, Mintz explored the nexus between the metropolis and the colony through Britain’s desire for sweetness. By focusing on sugar as an export commodity, Mintz examined how political and economic power was wielded in interactions between the colonial West Indies and Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. According to Mintz, the rise of the British factory system reinforced Caribbean sugar production. He explained that ‘cheaper sugar came at a time when its increased consumption was guaranteed not by the sugar habit itself, but by the factory world and machine rhythms which were the background of its use.’ Mintz concluded that readily accessible cheap calories (in the form of sugar) fueled industrial economies. Furthermore, this proliferation of sweetness ultimately transferred control over the foods workers ate to large corporations, thus transforming not only the British working-class diet but also the country’s palate by separating the source of food production from the locus of its consumption (Source: Fitzgerald & Petrick 2008 393).

What particularly interests Mr. Mintz about the plantations that developed in the Caribbean is that he believes they can best be thought of as 'agro-industrial’ enterprises, the closest thing to industry that the 17th century has to show. They were also, he argues, if not 'capitalistic’ themselves, nonetheless ‘an important step toward capitalism’ (Source: Gross 1985 15).

Mr. Mintz distinguishes five main uses to which sugar has been put, of which two are now unfamiliar, and one of no more than marginal significance. In medieval times it was regarded as a spice; until the 19th century it was prescribed as a medicine. It was also widely used by those who could afford it as a form of decoration, and Mr. Mintz gives a fascinating account of the sugar and marzipan sculptures, known as ‘subtleties,’ that were a feature of royal banquets from the 13th century onward, and then taken up in turn by the nobility and wealthy commoners. One 17th-century recipe that he quotes included, among other prodigies, instructions for making a sugar stag that ‘bled’ claret wine when an arrow was pulled out of its flank (Source: Gross 1985 15).

Mintz has yet another purpose here: to move away from simple binary relationships – colonies and metropoli, centers and peripheries, hubs and rims, producers and consumers – and avoid provincial viewpoints while emphasizing sugar’s role in the intricate, intimate meshwork that bound Great Britain and her Caribbean colonies (Source: Mutantkoala 2009 np link).

Mintz (1985) examines the development of production and consumption practises around sugar. In particular, he makes links with wider issues such as the growth in slavery. For Mintz, evolutionary and genetic factors around human preference for sweet substances are only a partial view of why we favour sweets. He maintains that we should look to the historical development of economic and political power, as well as economic affluence. An example of this can be seen in sweet eating in Britain. Mintz argues that sweet eating has its roots in historical imperialism, perceptions of luxury, cheap calories and the popularity of sugar-related commodities such as tea. More recently, Richardson (2002) highlights modern-day slavery in West Africa, where thousands of children have been sold to ‘brokers’ by poor families to work on cacao plantations. Until recently, the global chocolate industry has chosen to ignore such evidence (Source: Albon, 2005 410).

The author believes that a producer's labor and exploitation is not enough to understand the exploitation of production ... He sees the anthropology rooted in his study of a basic commodity-sugar-as a positive contestation of the bounded primitive as a mode of inquiry and one that connects rather than marginalizes its subjects (Source: Bahner 2006 np link).

He sees the global connectedness of commodity as a new shape in which to group peoples in the study of kinship, religion and other cultural phenomena. …The text concludes that the massive success of sugar in imposing a sort of consumptive hegemony in places like England and the United States, while not as significantly restructuring cultural practices in places like France and China, presents fertile ground for future research (Source: Bahner 2006 np link).

Inspiration / Technique / Process / Methodology

Mintz is a professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, and his whole professional life has been influenced by what Shiva Naipaul once called ‘that cruellest of crops’ - sugar cane. When in 1948 he went to Puerto Rico to start his anthropological fieldwork he chose an area given over to the cultivation of cane for the North American market. At that time he assumed there was a natural need for sugar (Source: Cooper 1996 5).

Studying a single food or commodity such as sugar may seem like an incongruous project for an anthropologist who claims to work mostly with living people. Still, it is a rich subject for someone interested in the history and character of the modern world, for its importance and popularity rose together with tea, colonial slavery, and the machine era. Had it not been for the immense importance of sugar in the world history of food, and in the daily lives of so many, I would have left it alone ... My work on sugar, Sweetness and Power, situates it within Western history because it was an old commodity, basic to the emergence of a global market. The first time I was in the field I'd been surrounded by it, as I did my fieldwork. That led me to try to trace it backward in time, to learn about its becoming domesticated, and how it spread and gained importance in the growing Western industrial world. I became awed by the power of a single taste, and the concentration of brains, energy, wealth and - most of all, power - that had led to its being supplied to so many, in such stunningly large quantities, and at so terrible a cost in life and suffering (Source: Mintz ndb np link).

Mintz’s sensitivity toward to the poor and the oppressed in the colonial world helped ground his research. In January 1948, he went to live with a young sugar cane worker in a shack in Barrio Jauca in Puerto Rico, where he developed a fascination with sugar and with the lives of such workers: ‘All the time I was in Barrio Jauca, I felt as if we were on an island, floating in a sea of cane. My work there took me into the fields regularly, especially but not only during the harvest (zafra). At that time most of the work was still done by human effort alone, without machines; cutting ‘seed,’ seeding, planting, cultivating, spreading fertilizer, ditching, irrigating, cutting, and loading cane— it had to be loaded and unloaded twice before being ground—were all manual tasks. I would sometimes stand by the line of cutters, who were working in intense heat and under great pressure, while the foreman stood (and the mayordomo rode) at their backs. If one had read about the history of Puerto Rico and of sugar, then the lowing of the animals, the shouts of the mayordomo, the grunting of the men as they swung their machetes, the sweat and dust and din easily conjured up an earlier island era. Only the sound of the whip was missing’ (Source: Project 2007 np link).

Yet for a time even as thoughtful an observer as Mr. Mintz, while he immersed himself in the life of the growers, tended to take for granted the other half of the equation. The Caribbean supplied the sugar - but where did the demand come from, and why had it increased so rapidly? Since the answers did not seem to him self-evident, he gradually felt impelled to study the European end of the story, and he has now written a book in which he traces the history of production and consumption alike, and speculates on the ways in which they interlock (Source: Gross 1985 15).

The mystery was not simply one of technical transformation, impressive as that is, but also the mystery of people unknown to one another being linked through space and time – and not just by politics and economics, but along a particular chain of connection maintained by their production (Source: Mintz 1985 xxiv).

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, anthropologists studied the food systems of technically simpler societies, and learned how self-contained economic systems functioned – for example, Malinowski’s work on the Trobriand Islanders. But they have been slow to apply what they know to bigger, seemingly more complex systems. That is now changing. My own work on food, which grew out of a book I wrote on sugar, has aimed at understanding how world food habits are changing, how the causes of such change work; how the food systems of the West and Asia are interpenetrating; what "cuisine" is, and how cuisines evolve over time; and what the future may hold for the food systems of human beings everywhere... The subject of food or eating habits reveals, as well as anything, the power of culture or cumulative tradition, to shape food behavior. Because of their capacity for tool use, and eventually for making and controlling fire, humans began to break the links between our animal nature and the food we ate. Thereupon the apparently endless search for our natural food became pointless as well. We have had no natural food since we became fully human, except perhaps for mother’s milk. The foods of different peoples, shaped by habitat and by our history, would become a vivid marker of difference, symbols both of belonging and of being excluded. Holy Writ (in the West, at least) is full of food, since food lends itself so well to the delineation of such differences (Source: Mintz nda np link).

My contention is that the social history of the use of new foods in a western nation can contribute to a puzzle, the resolution of some contradiction, perhaps even a discovery. But I remain uncertain. This book has tended to write itself; I have watched the process, hoping it would reveal something I did not already know’ (Source: Mintz 1985 xxviii).

Discussion / Responses

It is not that we need to jettison the small and the local - but that we do need to see 'the connections between things'. The local does not have to be insular, or parochial. One can start as Mintz has so brilliantly done with sugar, or with soap or tea; with the workhouse and crime; with painting and photographs, museums and fairs and exhibitions; or with popular literature, postcards and memory, with song and satire and the music hall. All fit subjects for the classroom. Whatever the starting point, however, it is necessary to return to the power relations at the heart of the matter: as Mintz does so superbly in Sweetness and Power (Source: Marks 1990 117).

Reviews of the book posted on its sales page reveal that it is indeed being read by non-anthropologists and even laymen. Several reviewers champion Mintz’ political science or economistic perspective, and one notes that the book is ‘a worthwhile endeavor, and for anthropology, actually almost a fun read’ (Source: Keuver 2010 np link).

Enough has been said to suggest the interest and value of this book. The achievement is enhanced when it is remembered that it was written both for the scholarly community and a more general readership. This is not to say it is without problems. The hypotheses could have been set out more clearly, the evidence marshalled more systematically, and more control exercised over the quantity of descriptive detail which at times swamps the central arguments. But, despite these shortcomings, Sweetness and Power remains an immensely readable and stimulating work (Source: Albert 1985 np link).

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. ... 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. … 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 (Source: hammersen 2008 np link).

Although interesting, the class based analysis of changing tastes for sugar seems overly complex.  It seems to me that you could write a much more interesting book simply chronicling references to sugar in contemporary media, spare all the analysis.  Taste spreads through communication by individuals.  Capitalism is unique in world history because 1) it creates growth and demand 2) it cares about what people want.  You can talk about good and bad effects of this process, but it is how capitalism actually functions (Source: Catdirt 2010 np link).

Sweet[ness] and Power was what I call a ‘consciousness raiser’ but it's also pedantic and the 80s Marxist analysis is dated.  Fun to read, but take the theory with more then (sic) a grain of salt (Source: Catdirt 2010 np link).

His book seems to simply present information and data to support whatever thought he is currently on, almost as if the author is rambling. There seem to be no defining arguments in the book, but rather a number of smaller arguments which are hardly more than thoughts stimulated by research. In all, a defining book on the history of sugar and is startling effects on a global scale, but only for the veteran reader with excellent diction (Source: Thompson 1999 np link).

Mintz’s book Sweetness and Power consists of an abundant amount of information about the history of sugar that is fascinating...On the other hand, the books structure was difficult to digest, brusquely it was disorganized. Many parts of his book were redundant; he states the same historical facts in different chapters and within the same chapter. Despite that the book well informs the reader of the journey of sugar throughout history, and if you enjoy reading about the formation of capitalism, Sweetness and Power contains a sweet surprise (Source: Valisa 2007 np link).

The book is also virulently opposed to evolutionary psychology, as Mintz argues that food traditions are bound to social customs, not innate taste preferences. Further research on the subject might focus more carefully on the rhetoric and reasoning offered by the British arbiters of power themselves regarding sugar. Mintz implicates them in oppression, but he does not investigate them directly (Source: Mutantkoala 2009 np link).

Mintz's brilliant study provides data that debunks the myth of progress and the myth that capitalism promotes ‘family values’ (Source: Gardner nd np link).

It's a great book for telling so many intertwined stories -- sugar, slavery, colonialism -- and doing justice to them all. … General writing style: dull and soporific. … There are times when the book is in dear need of an editor … absolutely fascinating stuff, but, like sugar, is a little sweeter in small doses (Source: O’Brien 2010 np link).

Mintz (1985) examines the development of production and consumption practises around sugar. In particular, he makes links with wider issues such as the growth in slavery. For Mintz, evolutionary and genetic factors around human preference for sweet substances are only a partial view of why we favour sweets. He maintains that we should look to the historical development of economic and political power, as well as economic affluence. An example of this can be seen in sweet eating in Britain. Mintz argues that sweet eating has its roots in historical imperialism, perceptions of luxury, cheap calories and the popularity of sugar-related commodities such as tea. More recently, Richardson (2002) highlights modern-day slavery in West Africa, where thousands of children have been sold to ‘brokers’ by poor families to work on cacao plantations. Until recently, the global chocolate industry has chosen to ignore such evidence (Source: Albon, 2005 410).

How this came to pass and what effects it has had on our lives and customs are the subjects of Mintz's inquiry, one that is more or less equally rewarding and frustrating -- rewarding because it contains useful information and provocative insights, frustrating because too much of it is couched in a dense, latinate prose that only an academic could love. One example will suffice: "Paradigmatic relations characterize the components within a meal, and syntagmatic relations characterize those among meals; or, to cite (Mary) Douglas again, 'On the two axes of syntagm and paradigm, chain and choice, sequence and set, call it what you will, (Halliday) has shown how food elements can be ranged until they are all accounted for either in grammatical terms or down to the last lexical item.’ Right (Source: Yardley 1985 3).

Now, I'm told that anthropologists these days like to talk that way, that they prefer to believe in the power of institutions rather than the appeal of things. Interesting, and I think for many ordinary readers, incomprehensible (Source: Hoffman 2006 np link).

In Sweetness and Power, Mintz (1985) describes at length how control of sugar production and consumption contributed to class hierarchy and colonial dominance but neglects consideration of gender. However, a telling photograph conveys the unstated message of assumed male control. The caption reads ‘Etienne Tholoniat, a great French sugar baker, puts the finishing touches on a life-size chocolate nude with spun-sugar hair. She is lying on a bed of six hundred sugar roses’ (Mintz 1985:184). Here the active, powerful male literally defines the female as a supine, passive, object of consumption – a food symbol for cultural practice mirroring male-female power relations (Source: Counihan & Kaplan 1998 2).

Sidney Mintz has been called our ‘foremost scholar on sweetness’ for his landmark work on the role of sugar in the world system. He is also, we must not forget, a great scholar of power; of the way it has operated historically and dialectically in shaping world history and human experience. Scholarly reviews of Sweetness and Power were generally quite critical. One reviewer called it ‘an odd, odd book’ and noted an ‘absence of sustained argument’ in its movement from subject to subject (Goldfrank 1987). Another suggested that readers curious about the linkages of sugar to the development of capitalism ‘might be better advised to read a good economic history’ (Roxborough 1986) (Source: Keuver 2010 np link).

While in some ways I found it to be somewhat Anglo-centric, it was a really fascinating account of the rise of sugar as a form of food. It's Mintz's contention that sugar and the patterns of consumption that surround it are not accidental or arbitrary, but instead the result of larger economic patterns. I found the production and eating and being chapters particularly helpful--Mintz talks about the way that sugar's chemical properties (especially in preserving food) and its historical circumstances have changed the way we eat--and thus the way that we relate to each other. This book is really remarkable (Source: Anon 2010b np link).

I want to suggest that there is much that is helpful in Mintz’s approach for displacing old questions about the relation between Caribbean pasts and Caribbean presents, and for introducing new ones. And finally, considering the argument of his best-known book, Sweetness and Power (1985), I will urge that it is important to read it for the place of the Caribbean in his understanding of the modern global world. For as far-flung as this book’s temporal and spatial canvas is, as fundamental as Europe is to the story about the transformation of taste it tells, it remains a book with a Caribbean centre and purpose (Source: Scott 2004 193).

This is still a timely read given the current reflection on the nature of world markets (Source: pleureur 2007 np link).

Outcomes / Impacts

After Mintz published his Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, a new genre got under way. There have since been histories of all kinds of unlikely things - cod, pineapples, nutmeg, typewriters - intended to demonstrate their social importance and aimed at non-specialist audiences (Source: Jack 2007 link).

Sahlins argues that Sweetness and Power ‘dared to take on capitalism as a cultural economy’ (1996: 395). In his 1994 Sidney W. Mintz lecture, later published in Current Anthropology, Sahlins claimed that the book produced ‘a concentrated rush of intellectual energy, especially among anthropologists because it revealed ‘the historical relativity of our native anthropology’ (1996: 415) (Source: Keuver 2010 np link).

Mintz’ work stands out in the field not only for its scholarly contributions but for its broad and relatively popular readership. Sweetness and Power has a sales rank of 20,832 on Amazon.com, an impressive number when compared to Geertz’ classic Interpretation of Cultures as 75,447, or Sahlins’ Culture in Practice, at 551,324 (Source: Keuver 2010 np link).

His book gave us another dimension to British history. Suddenly many things become clearer: why our mothers and grandmothers had their teeth pulled out in their early 20s, why our fathers loved jam, why our most fashionable gallery is called the Tate, why obesity is more a British problem than, say, a French one, why Lyle's Golden Syrup has a Biblical illustration on the tin (Source: Jack 2007 link).

Until perhaps last week I would have defined ‘taste’ in a cultural sense, but after reading Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, it seems appropriate to include sensory taste as an additional area of inquiry.  It seems to me that sensory taste is extraordinarily elastic.  Sweetness and Power is an interesting departure point for a consideration of the change of sensory taste (Source: Catdirt 2010 np link).

With these implications either we allow sugar to keep moving us, or we move it off the table, out of the cupboard and dump it into Boston Harbor (Source: Swallow 2002 np link).

In August 2008, just weeks before fall semester was to begin, I was thinking about Sidney Mintz's book while walking around at the Minnesota State Fair. After all, ‘fair food’ has many desirous qualities--fatty, oily, crunchy, salty and sweet. Chocolate covered bacon. Deep-fried candy bars. Foot-long hotdogs. 'nuff said. As it got darker our group was walking among the lights of the Midway when I saw her standing there--a carnival employee with two huge refillable half-gallon ‘mugs’ of soda. The bright lime green logo of Mountain Dew on the side of the mugs asserted that this was not just mere artificially colored, caffeine-laced, sugar water. It was a lifestyle statement. Full to the brim, the ‘mugs’ were so heavy she struggled to hold them both at waist level as she made her way through the crowds back to her booth. As I stopped to comment on the size of the Mountain Dews, she told me that they would get her and her co-worker through the busy night. She was the walking example of Sidney Mintz's argument (Source: Anon 2010b np link).

Mintz completely transformed my ideas on industrial capitalism. As a consumer and lover of sugar, I have now given a considerable amount of thought to the sugar that I consumed so often (Source: Anon nd np link).

Read this book. The next time you visit a cafe and confront a choice between white sugar (packed, perhaps, at the aptly-named Imperial Sugar Company) and the brown crystals of Sugar-in-the-Raw, the decision will suddenly seem so much more than one of mere taste or calories or purity. A hefty chunk of history, economics and anthropology will bear down upon you. Choose wisely (Source: Krishnamurthi 2004 np link).

It will make you want to brush your teeth. It will make you want to ease your sugar habits, but most of all, it will cause you to reconsider your views on slave labor in the Americas (Source: Drake 2008 np link)

I follow it [sugar] still – as well as honey, carob, aspartame, estevia, palm sugar, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and so on. I want to know what will happen with sweetness next: how its desirability confronts the costs it  poses to health, physical appearance, the environment, and the world order...How do we get from one child's sweet tooth to the history of slavery, of war, and of corporate lobbying in the Congress? And how do we retrace our steps backward, this time to the significance of that child's sweet tooth? Do these issues ever become so powerful that there may be thought of legislating the availability of this or other foods – the health implications of which can be debated? These are the kinds of questions that have arisen in recent years. Alongside them are the shacks of the cane cutters, scattered in so many of the earth’s tropical corners, which deserve at least equal attention from anthropologists (Source: Mintz nd(b) np link).

In addition to sugar, I have done some work on soybeans and soy foods (The World of Soy). Right now I’m looking at fermentation, a too little-noticed subject, when we consider that as much as one third of the food we eat is fermented. But these are by no means the span of the field studied by anthropologists. Anthropologists have useful things to say to ‘food people.’ Though not all of their research is encouraging or even exciting to listen to, much of it is important to hear (Source: Mintz nd(a) np link).

References / Further Reading

Albert, B. (1985) Book Reviews: Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar ln Modern History. World History Sugar Newsletter 14 October (http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/wshn/number7.html last accessed 15 July)

Albon, D. (2005). Approaches to the study of children, food and sweet eating: a review of the literature. Early Child Development and Care, 175 (5) p.407- 417

Anon (nd) Term paper, essay, research paper on Sweetness And Power. Customessaymeister.com (http://www.customessaymeister.com/customessays/Capitalism/8914.htm last accessed 18 June 2012)

Anon (1990) Exhaustive Research shows Sweets are Erotic. Courier-Mail 15 February

Anon (2010a) Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by Sidney W. Mintz. A Reader’s Digest 13 Aug (http://areadersdigest.blogspot.com/2010/08/sweetness-and-power-place-of-sugar-in.html last accessed 15 July 2011)

Anon (2010b) Does the Market Have a Flavor?. Museumfatigue.org 3 May (http://museumfatigue.org/does-the-market-have-a-flavor last accessed 15 July 2011)

ayabaya (2010) Interview of Sydney Mintz. Youtube.com 26 March (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYO9Xhv-0Ls&feature=channel + http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qF_moabBbDA last accessed 20 July 2011)

Bauser, M. (1992) Michael Bauser is Losing his Mind. Michael.bauser.name (http://www.michael.bauser.name/19920612T054840Z last accessed 18 July 2011)

Beddow, R. (1986) 25 Books Nominated By Critics; Circle Announces List For the Best of ’85. The Washington Post 11 January

Bhaner, A. (2006) Political Economy Canon; A Classic That Remade Anthropology and Cultural Studies. Amazon.com 13 March (http://www.amazon.com/Sweetness-Power-Place-Modern-History/product-reviews/0140092331/ref=cm_cr_pr_link_1?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0 last accessed 14 July 2011)

Carney, J. (2008). Reconsidering Sweetness and Power through a gendered lens. Food and Foodways 16(2): p.127-134

Catdirt (2010) Book Review: Sweetness and Power *The Place of Sugar in ModernHistory. Catdirtsez.blogspot.com 11 May (http://catdirtsez.blogspot.com/2010/05/book-review-sweetness-and-power-place.html last accessed 15 July 2011)

Conlogue, R. (2004) The Power of One Word; it's a Long Story but there's a Trend in Publishing to Short, Punchy Titles. Globeandmail.com 8 March

Cooper, D. (1996) THE FOOD COLUMN: World's Unhealthy Alliance with the 'Cruellest of Crops'. Scotland on Sunday September 15

Counihan, C. & Kaplan, S. (1998). Food and Gender: Identity and Power. London: Gordon and Breach

Drake, E. (2008) Want to Brush Your Teeth More Often. Amazon.com (http://www.amazon.com/review/R1UL2O3VWUT35P last accessed 18 June 2012)

Earle, T. (2010) Trade and Exchange: Archaeological Studies from History and Prehistory. Humanities, Social Science and Law, Part 4 p.205-217

Fitzgerald, G. & Petrick, G. (2008) In Good Taste: Rethinking American History with our Palates. The Journal of American History 95 (2) p.392-404

Gardner, F. (nd) Sweetness and Power. Reprinted from Anderson Valley Advertiser (http://www.processedworld.com/Issues/issue33/avafood.htm last accessed 15 July 2011)

Goff, S. (2010) Sugar–the short biography of a commodity. Feralscholar.org 26 Aug (http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2010/08/26/a-few-things-about-sugar/ last accessed 20 July 2011)

Gross, J. (1985) Sweetness and Power - Books of the Times. The New York Times, 11 June

hammersen (2008) Sweetness and Power: The place of sugar in modern history by Sidney Mintz. Librarything.com (http://www.librarything.com/work/36069 last accessed 15 July 2011)

Hechavarri, D. (2005) Book Review: Sweetness and Power. Associatedcontent.com (http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/11026/book_review_sweetness_and_power_pg2.html?cat=38 last accessed 18 July 2011)

Hoffman, L. (2006) Unique. Amazon.com 31 December (http://www.amazon.com/Sweetness-Power-Place-Modern-History/product-reviews/0140092331/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_next_2?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=2 last accessed 15 July 2011)

Jack, I. (2007) Britain is Built on Sugar: Our National Sweet Tooth Defines Us: A Brilliant History of Sugar Tells the Story of how this Human Appetite Remade the World. The Guardian (London) October 13 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/oct/13/lifeandhealth.britishidentity last accessed 15 July 2011)

Keuver, E. (2010) Sidney Mintz. Anthropology Department: Indiana University Bloomington 14 October (http://www.indiana.edu/~wanthro/theory_pages/Mintz.htm last accessed 15 July 2011)

Krishnamurthi (2004) Sweetness and Power. Brown University: Computer Science Department (http://www.cs.brown.edu/~sk/Personal/Books/Mintz-Sweetness-Power/ last accessed 18 June 2012)

Marks, S. (1990) History, the Nation and Empire: Sniping from the Periphery. History Workshop 29 p.111-119

Masquelier, A. (2009) Consumption, prostitution, and reproduction: the poetics of sweetness in bori. American Ethnologist 22 (4) p.883-906

McMichael, P. (1995) Food and Agrarian Orders in the World-Economy. Westport: Greenwood Press

McMichael, P. (1999) The power of food. Agriculture and Human Values 17 p. 21-33

Mintz, S. (1985) Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Harmondsworth: Penguin

Mintz, S. (nd a) The Study of Food. Sidneymintz.com (http://sidneymintz.net/food.php last accessed 25 July 2011)

Mintz, S. (nd b) Sugar. Sindeymintz.com (http://sidneymintz.net/sugar.php last accessed 25 July 2011)

Mintz, S. (nd c) nt. Sydneymintz.net (http://www.sidneymintz.net/ last accessed 20 July 2011)

Mintz, S. & Du Bois, C. (2002) The Anthropology of Food and Eating. Annual Review of Anthropology 31 p.99-119

Mutantkoala (2009) Veldie, Mintz, and Hidier. Livejournal. 30 May (http://mutantkoala.livejournal.com/358123.html last accessed 14 Oct. 2010)

O’Brien, D. (2010) Dennis O’Brien Reviews – Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Goodreads Inc (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/86787998 last accessed 18 June 2012)

pleureur (2007) Interesting insight into history of a food that we take for granted. Amazon.com 24 September (http://www.amazon.com/Sweetness-Power-Place-Modern-History/product-reviews/0140092331/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_1?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0 last accessed 15 July 2001)

Procida, M. (2004) No Longer Half-Baked: Food Studies and Women’s History. Journal of Women’s History 16(3) p.197-205

Project, L. (2007) Sweetness and Power. Louis Project: The Unrepentant Marxist 22 July (http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/07/22/sweetness-and-power/ last accessed 15 July 2011)

Ryle, J. (1985) Books: The Sweet Poison / Review of ' Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History' by Sidney W Mintz. The Sunday Times (London) December 1

Scott, D. (2004) Modernity that predated the modern: Sidney Mintz’s Caribbean. History Workshop Journal 58 p.191-210

Smith, W. (1992) Complications of the Commonplace: Tea, Sugar, and Imperialism. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 23(2) p.259-278
Swallow, S. (2002) How has sugar moved you. Amazon.com 16 November (http://www.amazon.com/Sweetness-Power-Place-Modern-History/product-reviews/0140092331/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_1?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0 last accessed 15 June 2011)

Thompson, J. (1999) Information on the topic, but presented poorly... Amazon.com 4 December (http://www.amazon.com/Sweetness-Power-Place-Modern-History/product-reviews/0140092331/ref=cm_cr_pr_btm_link_next_2?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&pageNumber=2 last accessed 15 July 2011)

Turgeon, L. & Pastinelli, M. (2002) ‘Eat the World’: Postcolonial Encounters in Quebec City's Ethnic Restaurants. Journal of American Folklore 115(456): p.247-268

Valisa (2007) Do you have a sweet tooth?. Cerebraldistortion.blogspot.com 27 December (http://cerebraldistortion.blogspot.com/2007/12/do-you-have-sweet-tooth.html last accessed 15 July 2011)

Wells, K. (2007) Symbolic capital and material inequalities: memorializing class and “race” in the multicultural city. Space and Culture 10(2) p.195-206

Wemisse (2010) Reflections on ‘Sweetness and Power’. The search for balance and harmony 10 September (http://isoropia.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/reflections-on-sweetness-and-power/ last accessed 15 July 2010)

Wu, D. & Cheung, S. (2002) The Globalization of Chinese Food. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press

Yardley, J. (1985) The Making of the World's Sweet Tooth. The Washington Post 7 July


Compiled by Anita Badejo, Josephine Korijn and Asya Rahlin, edited by Jack Parkin and Ian Cook (last updated September 2012) Page created for followthethings.com as part of the ‘Anthropologies of global connection’ course, Brown University.