Sweetness and Power

“What we like, what we eat, how we eat it, and how we feel about it are phenomenologically interrelated matters; together, they speak eloquently to the question of how we perceive ourselves in relation to others.”

Statements like this—about the connectedness of our experiences and our understanding of our social positions relative to other people—illustrate the author’s insistence on fulsome social analysis. His focus in this study—the eating habits of the English—is inseparable from factors like race, class, and the ability to generate meaning from experience. The discussion of the ability to contextualize one’s social positions also speaks to individual agency that Mintz grants in his theorizing.

“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.