danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

I won’t lie to you people; I eat a lot of sugar. I suspect sucrose constitutes a substantial portion–if not an outright majority–of my daily caloric intake. An irony I only just acknowledged is that I know almost nothing about sugar production, including the planting, cultivation, refining and processing of cane into the delicious crystals we all know and love. I can think of no other subject so important in my life about which I know so little, outside of the realm of physics (I don’t understand Newton, but I obey the laws of classical mechanics, for example).

But that is all changing now that I am reading Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, by Sidney Mintz. I won’t call it a page-turner, since it is an academic book, with copious annotations and dull statistics. But it is informative. For instance, I never gave any thought to it, but up until a couple hundred years ago, sugar constituted a minuscule portion of the average person’s diet, and not long before that, almost no Europeans had ever even tasted it; it was unknown there before 1100. For someone like me, who frequently eats cookies for breakfast, those would, indeed, be dark ages.

I am taking a course on the history of consumption (consumerism, not the disease), and Sweetness and Power is one of our texts. Sugar’s rise from rare “spice” to global commodity was not miraculous, nor without victims. Indeed, sugar’s place in our daily lives probably would not have come to pass had the industry that brought it to all corners of the world not relied so heavily on slave labor for long. By the time human bondage was ended in the Caribbean, sugar had so endeared itself to us, that its place on our tables and in our recipes was secure.

I am looking forward to learning more about our shift from a society in which the gap between production and consumption was nonexistent, to a society in which we are entirely divorced from production of goods. That phenomenon is compounded in the United States by our gaping trade deficit:  so few products are manufactured in America.  I also wonder if we’ll explore a theory of mine, which is that we consumers no longer drive production for many goods, but that we simply buy what producers make us.

Meanwhile, I am going to go enjoy some…

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Filed under: Food, Literature and Books, School on January 15th, 2008