Sweetness and Power

“Marshall described in detail how four hunters who killed an eland, following ten days of hunting and three days of tracking the wounded animal, bestowed the meat upon others—other hunters, the wife of the owner of the arrow that first wounded the prey, the relatives of the arrow’s owner, etc. She recorded sixty-three gifts of raw meat and thought there had been many more. Small quantities of meat were rapidly diffused, passed on in ever-diminishing portions. This swift movement was not random or quixotic; it actually illuminated the interior organization of the !Kung band, the distribution of kinfolk, divisions of sex, age, and role. Each occasion to eat meat was hence a natural occasion to discover who one was, how one was related to others, and what was entailed.”

A society’s eating habits reveal something about the internal structure of that society. In a premodern or non-capitalist society like this !Kung band, eating is intrinsically social. Twentieth-century eating habits have generally individualized the eating experience with an emphasis on snacking alone rather than communal mealtimes, but this asocial kind of eating still reveals something about the broader structure of 20th-century societies.

“But when unfamiliar substances are taken up by new users, they enter into pre-existing social and psychological contexts and acquire—or are given—contextual meanings by those who use them.” 

It is not sufficient to say that sugar is pleasantly sweet and that it is therefore inevitable that humans would take to it enthusiastically and in broadly similar ways. Upon being introduced to sugar, different societies and different classes within these societies assign meaning to sugar products based on the unique ways the products are used and on pre-existing cultural assumptions. Rather than deny agency to human actors, this insight acknowledges that people do not act and generate meaning in a vacuum.

“Culture must be understood not simply as a product but also as a production, not simply as socially constituted but also as socially constituting.”

Culture is a reflexive concept; it imperfectly programs individuals even while individuals reprogram culture itself throughout the life of a society. Mintz’s anthropological background ensures his emphasis on the importance of culture, and this emphasis supplements this study’s Marxist class and economic analysis. The various historical meanings of sugar relate to the cultural context of consumption.

“As the production of sugar became significant economically, so that it could affect political and military (as well as economic) decisions, its consumption by the powerful came to matter less; at the same time, the production of sugar acquired that importance precisely because the masses of English people were now steadily consuming more of it, and desiring more of it than they could afford.”

The meaning of sugar for the upper classes changed when sugar use began to trickle down to other segments of English society. Sugar’s status symbolism for the wealthy was untenable once sugar’s wider availability and affordability made it a staple for the middle and eventually the poor working classes. This solves the apparent contradiction between the sharp rise in sugar’s economic importance (especially beginning in the 18th century) and its reduced symbolic importance for the upper class.

“It is not merely ironical to point out that the white migrants would soon be eating more sugar, produced by the nonwhite migrants at lower wages, and producing finished goods at higher wages, to be consumed by the nonwhite migrants.”

The sugar market was the cause of mass migration in the 19th century after the abolition of slavery. This migration was unequal along racial lines: European whites tended to move to European colonial holdings like Canada and Australia, while nonwhites moved in the direction of sugar production to fill new labor needs. It is ironic that low-wage nonwhite laborers produced sugar for export to white migrants who exported finished goods back to the nonwhite migrants. This real-world irony connects to the previous English mercantilist arrangement that restricted colonial markets in ways that did not benefit plantation workers and enslaved people.

“Almost inevitably, sugar lost many of its special meanings when the poor were also able to eat it. But later, making sugar available in ever-larger quantities to the poor became patriotic as well as profitable.”

When sugar’s price dropped and its availability spread, its meaning changed at multiple levels; sugar lost its symbolic value for the rich while it gained practical value for the poor, just as it gained meaning as profit for the factory owning class and as a political cache for the governing class. Mintz also indicates how ironic it is that, given the history of colonial forced labor in Caribbean sugar production, anybody would fancy themselves charitable for facilitating sugar availability to the working-class population of England.

“What the consumption of sugar permits us to understand about how societies change may matter more than the consumption itself.” 

One of the core arguments of this book is that the history of Caribbean sugar production and consumption in England, including the changing meanings of sugar over time, is also a map of English societal structure. From an anthropological point of view, researching the social organization of sugar plantations in Barbados is just as interesting as researching how the English state understood its responsibility to its people in terms of providing affordable sugar. The author laments that more anthropologists are not as curious about the latter process as they are the former.

“These additions [tea, coffee, and chocolate] to the diet of the English people signaled the linkage of the consumption habits of every Englishman to the world outside England, and particularly to the colonies of the empire.”

This is a pure statement about the intrinsic connection between production and consumption, in the obvious sense that food must come from somewhere. However, there is the more specific sense that the consumption habits of a specific group on a specific island nation required an entire transatlantic artifice—involving legislation, colonial protectionist agreements, crimes against humanity in the form of forced labor, and a growing taste for sweetness among sugar consumers.

“Even if a greater absolute sum is spent on food—indeed, even if a greater percentage of a higher income is spent on food—this is not sufficient evidence, of itself, that the diet has improved. Moreover, the high probability of culturally patterned differential consumption within the family—everybody eats more sugar, but women and children eat relatively more than adult men; everybody gets some meat, but adult men get disproportionately more than women and children—suggests a very different truth.”

Statistics alone, without rudimentary social analysis, tell an incomplete story about the eating habits of the working-class English. Plain sexism can paradoxically result in both malnutrition for women and children and a net increase in calorie-dense foods under the same roof over the same period. Theories about the kinds of food men need to perform their work and the kinds of food fit for women and children also affect the meaning of sugar and its interpretation (for a time) as a feminine foodstuff.

“Prepared foods, in other words, accompany the increasing frequency of meals taken outside the home and outside the familial context.”

The decline of the communal home meal (usually prepared by one person for the whole family) is connected to the rise of capitalism and free trade beginning in the 19th century, the sharp increase in sugar consumption alongside its plummeting price, and the profitability of sucrose-infused snacks. The rise of the capitalist mode of production thus bears responsibility for the decreased sociality of eating in societies like England and the United States.

“Where does the locus of meaning reside? For most human beings most of the time, the meanings believed to inhere in things and in the relationships among things and acts are not given but, rather, are learned. Most of us, most of the time, act within plays the lines of which were written long ago, the images of which require recognition, not invention.”

Here, the author delimits human agency in terms of meaning-generation. It is not necessary that humans, in the course of their everyday lives, constantly reinvent the meanings of their relationships with their environments and with other people; preexisting cultural meanings are available. This statement is not meant to deny human agency, but rather to limit its scope.

“It was not just that labor worked harder in order to get more; those who paid its wages profited both from labor’s higher productivity and from its heightened use of store-purchased commodities.”

The establishment of the capitalist mode of production is a double victory for the factory owner. First, workers become willing to work longer to earn more, which more greatly profits the owners of capital since the purchase of labor power is inherently exploitative (according to the Marxist conception of labor). Second, the worker is often forced to consume goods from the factory store that sells food commodities at a profit. Symbolically, this is a return of the colonial mercantile relationship of England with its sugar islands; colonial holdings were forced to purchase finished goods from the motherland.

“The readiness of working people to work harder in order to be able to earn—and thus consume—more was a crucial feature of the evolution of modern patterns of eating.”

This new drive of the laboring classes to work and earn more (which was itself a force unleashed by broader economic structural changes) enabled increased consumption. This gave rise to new possibilities in terms of diet and work arrangements. Geographical and economic forces like urbanization and capitalism triggered new possibilities, ultimately changing how and what people consumed.

“Slave and proletarian together powered the imperial economic system that kept the one supplied with manacles and the other with sugar and rum; but neither had more than minimal influence over it. The growing freedom of the consumer to choose was one kind of freedom, but not another.”

This class-based economic analysis highlights the inaccessibility of real power to the working class (and obviously the enslaved class). The appearance of choice, for the worker, manifests as an ultimately trivial consumer choice. In contrast, the powerful choices of ruling class members manifest as real consequences for millions. The necessity of forced labor to production goals—and the notion of a freedom based on the complete unfreedom for an entire class—is an ancient irony replaying itself in the history of sugar production.

“Tobacco, sugar, and tea were the first objects within capitalism that conveyed with their use the complex idea that one could become different by consuming differently. This idea has little to do with nutrition or primates or sweet tooths, and less than it appears to have with symbols. But it is closely connected to England’s fundamental transformation from a hierarchical, status-based, medieval society to a social-democratic, capitalist, and industrial society.”

It is a familiar modern-day idea that consumer choice reflects personality or character. Mintz is clasping together what appear to be parochial and personal consumer choices with vast overhauls in fundamental societal structure; this is the sociological task of connecting personal destiny with impersonal and perhaps indecipherable historical change. Consumers feel that having sugar in the home and offering it to guests is a status symbol—but this feeling is connected to economic and political forces that are likely beyond the consumers’ control.

“But the ever-rising consumption of sugar was an artifact of intraclass struggles for profit—struggles that eventuated in a world-market solution for drug foods, as industrial capitalism cut its protectionist losses and expanded a mass market to satisfy proletarian consumers once regarded as sinful or indolent.” 

The end of mercantile arrangements between England and its overseas colonies did not come automatically; fierce battles between proponents of protectionist policies and purveyors of the free market eventually resulted in the success of free market principles. Subsequent to this struggle, sugar availability increased, and its price decreased in response to the opening up of markets. This was well-received by eager, primarily working-class sugar consumers in England, and members of the ruling class who could never otherwise befriend the poor could now boast about their role in guaranteeing sugar to the masses.

“Eventually, the traditional sugars survive as heirlooms of a sort—expensive relics of the past—whereupon they may reappear as stylish ‘natural’ or conspicuous items on the tables of the rich, whose consumption habits helped to make them rare and expensive in the first place, now produced in modern ways that make money for people quite different from those who formerly produced them.”

This is another familiar full-circle story. Treacle and other traditional forms of sugar became novelties of the rich after centuries’ worth of developments in the production of refined sugar rendered sucrose a mass commodity. Finding an overpriced traditional Mayan hot chocolate beverage for sale at a modern-day farmer’s market is a comparable example to what Mintz describes here.

“The meal, which had a clear internal structure, dictated at least to some degree by the one-cook-to-one-family pattern and the consequences of socialization within such a pattern, as well as by ‘tradition,’ can now mean different items and different sequences for each consumer.” 

Mintz here describes a traditional family meal in which one woman would prepare a meal, from start to finish, for her entire household, all of whom would eat together around a table. Throughout this study, Mintz laments the desocialization inherent in England’s and the United States’ large-scale discarding of the family “meal” in favor of intermittent individual food-taking (often snacking). The author stops short of an obvious value-judgment, but it is clear that he is worried about the development.

“Choices to be made about eating […] are now made with less reference to fellow eaters, and within ranges predetermined, on the one hand, by food technology and, on the other, by what are perceived as time constraints.”

The 20th century introduced a new, time-related anxiety. The author writes that individuals forgo traditional mealtimes in favor of intermittent snacks’ time-efficiency. Mintz stresses that this common experience of time pressure developed alongside capitalism’s insistence on time discipline. In the 20th century and beyond, eating has become rushed and utilitarian, and it increasingly involves processed food to which one has no connection beyond having bought the product.

“Consuming prepared food means surrendering much of one’s choice in what one eats. But, not surprisingly, the food industry touts it as increasing one’s freedom of choice—especially when the industry omits reference to what the food itself contains. Thus is the dialectic between supposed individual freedom and social patterning perpetuated.”

The appearance of freedom in the context of unprecedented constraint shows up once again. Mintz questions a freedom that must take for granted a faceless corporation’s willingness to ensure that their ingredients and manufacturing process result in a healthful product. Individual freedom is always conditioned by the larger economic or social structures, but Mintz points out how the arenas appearing to offer the most freedom are sometimes the most conditioned and unfree.

“How much time people actually have for different pursuits, how much time they believe they have, and the relationship between these are aspects of daily life shaped by externalities and, in particular in the modern world, by the reorganization of the workday. What seem visible to the worker, however, are the changed conditions of work.”

While structural economic and societal changes invariably affect individual destinies and experiences, those individuals are often unaware of how. Even if one notices when the nature of their work changes, they might not be able to trace a clear line between, for example, global economic shifts and the invention of the half-hour lunch break. The experience of lacking time is even more difficult to trace because it manifests as an endless anxiety rather than as an empirical set of changes.

“We are what we eat; in the modern western world, we are made more and more into what we eat, whenever forces we have no control over persuade us that our consumption and our identity are linked.”

Consumers since the 20th century are subject to relentless and far-reaching marketing campaigns that promise some kind of purchase will improve one’s life and reflect one’s true personality. This is another arena of masked unfreedom; the hundred ostensible choices between different jeans or sodas are mediated not just by marketing forces but also by the decisions of people we will never meet. These powerful people turn a profit by creating demand for these products in the first place. Consumers who believe that their identity is tied up in a particular product are the most reliable repeat customers.

“Diet is remade because the entire productive character of societies is recast and, with it, the very nature of time, of work, of leisure.”

Ultimately, this is an optimistic statement. In demonstrating how the diet of various strata of the English was made and remade over centuries, Mintz suggests that change is fundamentally possible. If one is concerned about their life being formed through an external locus of social or economic control, one should first understand what forces delimit their thoughts and actions—and then define what a better life would look like.