Sidney W. Mintz’s book Sweetness and Power: the Place of Sugar in
Modern History is not, at first glance, anything to do with fitness. That said, I can find fitness
principles almost everywhere and it is easier than usual in a book about the
evolution of our society around a food.
Anyone with interest in history,
anthropology, or food can find something fascinating in the book. There are questions of social justice
inherent in the historical consumption of sugar and other “drug foods”—tea,
coffee, chocolate, and rum as well as in our current consumption.
The book traces how the
convenience and cheapness of sugar transformed meals by emphasizing convenience
and quick calories. The stimulant
properties of sugar, especially combined with tea and/or coffee, kept the
emerging proletarians working. The
once-exclusive luxury became the opiate of the people, so to speak.
It does not take a lot of
imagination to apply the history of sugar to all the other convenient,
mass-produced foods that surround us.
The place of sugar in our diets exists because of concerted effort to
make it so. We have the
opportunity to question whether we want all those processed foods, to subvert
the dominant paradigm, to return to fresh whole foods and the process of cooking,
to create social meaning through eating together.
If we are what we eat, perhaps we
should choose wisely and with the perspective of history.
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