Book Review : From a Spice to a Staple: How Sugar Became Our Cup of Tea

Sweetness and Power by Sidney Mintz (Viking: $20)

This is being written at the bottom of Beacon Hill, onetime home of Boston’s Brahmin tradition. Nobody makes beans here anymore except to feed tourists. Cod goes under the name of scrod and is the gastronomic equivalent of clinical depression. The food axis runs along Charles Street from the Haagen-Dazs ice cream store, installed in the 18th Century Meeting House, to Aunt Sally’s Cookies.

Now this is the City of Boston,

The home of the Chocolate Chip.

Where the Lowells no longer look to the Cabots nor the Cabots to God,

As people once said.

Their three-way relationship

Moved away years ago to Beverly Farms and Marblehead.

From Brahmin to yuppie, from codfish to ice cream--Sidney Mintz would see the connection. His book “Sweetness and Power” is largely a history and partly an anthropology of sugar. The history sometimes blocks out the anthropology, which is a pity. Because behind the trade statistics and the production methods there are some beguiling thoughts on the relation of food and society.

In the 8th Century the Venerable Bede is said to have left to his friends his small stock of spices, including sugar. Mintz is skeptical, since he cannot trace the introduction of sugar to Northern Europe much before the year 1000.

But it is clear that for a number of centuries, sugar--brought at the time from Morocco--was such a rarity that, except for an occasional royal banquet, it was used not as a sweetener but as a spice. Mintz gives us Henry III asking the mayor of Winchester to see if he can get together three pounds of it. A while later, the Countess of Leicester’s household accounts record the use of 55 pounds of sugar over seven months, along with 53 pounds of pepper.

The Trickle-Down Effect

After that, of course, things changed. From a noble luxury it became, by the 18th Century, a luxury available to farmers’ wives. By the 19th Century, it became “the first mass-produced exotic necessity of a proletarian working class.”

In England, Mintz’s principal model, consumption grew 20-fold from 1660 to 1775, five-fold in the century that followed. Sugar fed the working class; first by sweetening its tea--unsweetened, it would never have become the national staple--and then in the jam on its bread.

Tea-sweetener and jam fundamental, it provided the first convenience food, just in time for the Industrial Revolution. Instead of home-brewed beer, vegetable broth and porridge--all of which took time to prepare--bread and jam and tea allowed the housewife to go out and work in the mills.

Today, of course, it is everywhere; and still the heart of our convenience gastronomy or, as a French writer cited by Mintz put it, “our gastroanomie.” It is more invisible than visible for all kinds of preservative and cosmetic effects in packaged food that have nothing to do with sweetness. Mintz mentions, among other things, “go-away.” Manufacturers of peanut butter put in as much as 10% sugar to induce go-away or, as most of us would put it, so the stuff won’t stick to the roof of our mouths.

Stimulating Juxtapositions

Mintz makes some stimulating juxtapositions. While English home life was being transformed, so was the world. There was the plantation economy, in which sugar dwarfed cotton and coffee.

“I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe but I know well that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world: America has been depopulated so as to have land on which to plant them; Africa has been depopulated so as to have the people to cultivate them.”

This was a Frenchman writing in the 18th Century. Mintz uses it as epigraph, and adds his own phrase. To change sugar from exotic luxury to mass staple--and to transform a whole series of social and economic relationships--required “the labor of millions of slaves stolen from Africa on millions of acres of the new world stolen from the Indians.” “The bitter crop,” the Cubans used to call it.

Mintz also explores the notion of lightness, of change, of instant gratification inherent in sugar, both as sweetener and as the basis for commercial foods.

“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.”

And he goes on to consider the further implication of the shift from home preparation to industrial preparation. Some individual freedom may be gained when one family member snacks, another eats a TV dinner, another diets on yogurt and a fourth eats packaged health food. But commonality, as symbolized by the family meal, is lost. And so, ultimately, is our autonomy over what we eat, despite the illusion of choice.

This illusion, Mintz believes, is manipulated by the food industries. “We are what we eat,” he writes, quoting the German proverb; “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.”