30 pages • 1 hour read
Sidney W. MintzSweetness and Power
Sidney W. MintzNonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
The Changing Meanings and Uses of Sugar
Sugar’s diverse and historically changing meaning is a core preoccupation of this study. Mintz flags this early on in Sweetness and Power when he asserts that “uses imply meanings; to learn the anthropology of sugar, we need to explore the meanings of its uses, to discover the early and more limited uses of sugar, and to learn what and for what original purposes sugar was produced” (6). New products arrive with their own symbolic baggage, but people do not automatically absorb new meanings in the exact way previous consumers did.
When England’s aspiring upper classes began featuring their own sugar subtleties at dinner parties in emulation of the 15th-century royalty who first adopted the practice, this new class similarly intended to impress their guests with their little sugar sculptures. However, these items’ display and consumption did not reinforce the hosts’ power as it did for the royals; that is, these items did not “[give] concrete expression to temporal and spiritual power” (154). Rather, for the English upper classes, these subtleties became an edible status symbol that echoed the gravity of prior usage without truly furnishing it.
Sugar’s abundance and availability to the working class further changed the food’s meanings; although the “symbolic weight that endured among the rich and powerful until sucrose became common, cheap, and desired” (207) was not entirely eliminated, sugar’s emotional resonance for the rich was “qualitatively changed by [sugar’s] abundance” (208). For new working-class consumers, practical uses came to define sugar’s meaning. Urban factory workers could be relieved that sugar “served to make a busy life seem less so; in the pause that refreshes, it eased, or seemed to ease, the changes of back and forth from work to rest” (186).
The author’s focus on how people do not wholesale adopt pre-existing meanings and symbolic associations implies a theory of human action that grants real individual agency. A consumer perceives a novel product’s attached meanings, and they incorporate the novelty, along with its meanings, into their existing web of meanings. This web is a mixture of received cultural meanings and unique associations based on individual experience; these newly integrated meanings will usually change based on unique individual associations.
The Price and Paradox of Freedom
When it comes to the history of sugar production in the English colonies and consumption on the mainland, freedom was never free. The expansion of English imperial interests was underpinned by the ultimate unfreedom of slavery on the colonial sugar islands. The English consumer’s freedom of choice regarding sugar products required coerced labor abroad. After slavery’s abolition in the 19th century, newly free West Indian workers did not immediately experience a pure freedom either: They were “almost entirely ignored by the metropolis” and “became invisible” (176) until the migration of many formerly enslaved people onto the English mainland forced the state’s contentious acknowledgment.
With the rise of free trade and the abundance of processed food products including new sugar commodities, the average English consumer exercised the freedom to abandon traditional family meals. Instead, eating what and when one desired became the obvious and popular choice. However, this freedom came at the cost of “the elimination of the social significance of eating together” (201). Freedom of dietary choice is equally a freedom “from the order of courses, from the social discourse of the family dinner table, and from the patterning of meal and time” (147); it is an altogether lonelier and possibly less fulfilling freedom than one might initially expect.
This freedom of choice also came at the health cost of routinely ingesting dangerous food additives in processed foods including sucrose and, increasingly since the 20th century, high-fructose corn syrup. Although Mintz’s study does not dwell on the health repercussions of excess sucrose consumption, he knows of these negative consequences. While there was “no conspiracy at work to wreck the nutrition of the British working class, to turn them into addicts, or to ruin their teeth” (186), this was an inevitable outcome for many who took advantage of their freedom to choose convenient processed foods. Even the coveted time-saving reward of such sustenance came at the cost of servitude to the clock under the foreman’s watchful eye in the new age of industrial capitalism; Mintz emphasizes a causal link between capitalism and the modern obsession with time-efficiency. Forced submission to grueling factory conditions to draw a meager wage to support one’s family was perhaps the ultimate price of our newfound “freedom.”
Contributing to an “Anthropology of the Present” or “Anthropology of Modern Life”
This study is both the author’s love letter to anthropology and a sustained criticism of what Mintz observes to be some common missteps in the field. He hopes to contribute to an anthropology that takes the un-romanticized past to generate equal curiosity about the present moment.
Mintz agrees with the prevailing attitude in the field that studying foreign “societies the behaviors of whose members are sufficiently different from our own” allows us “to document the marvelous variability of human custom while vouchsafing the unshakeable, essential oneness of the species” (xxvi). However, the concern is that this attitude can make it easy to ignore some truths; Western anthropologists routinely confer the label “primitive” to societies that are not so. These anthropologists also ignore any pre-existing Western influence upon their aboriginal subjects because they want to present an image of “pristine primitivity” (xxvii).
The author wants to move the discipline away from an obsession with so-called “unspoiled” or “primitive” conditions and toward the study of change. Anthropology still must explore transcendently important institutions and social realities like family, rites of passage, kinship, and marriage—but the field can also explore the roots of change (and why things say the same) by field experience and willingness to deeply engage fewer subjects instead of reaping thin rewards from a broad survey of topics.
Mintz intentionally focuses on something as apparently simple as sugar to make his contribution to an anthropology of the present: First, sugar does have a fascinating history, but second, the history of sugar production and consumption reveals how deep societal structural changes, centuries in the making, cause shockwaves that affect our present assumptions and practices surrounding food. The counter-intuitive nature of the subject matter is also a great hook for the book: “[W]hat could be less ‘anthropological’ than the historical examination of a food that graces every modern table?” (xxvii). As the author is acutely aware, however, “the anthropology of just such homely, everyday substances may help us to clarify both how the world changes from what it was to what it may become, and how it manages at the same time to stay in certain regards very much the same” (xxvii).
Unlock all 30 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 9,150+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features: