Reddit reviews Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History
We found 6 Reddit comments about Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Penguin Books
There's a pretty good book about this, Sweetness and Power. Not UK-specific, but it looks at the intertwining of sugar and politics through history in a comprehensive way.
What about Sidney W. Mintz's Sweetness and Power? Published in 1986, it's 274 pages.
This has become a trendy topic recently, and there's been a lot of great material published. Here are a few books I'm a big fan of:
Cwiertka, Katarzyna J. Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power and National Identity. London: Reaktion Books, 2006. This book has really stayed with me. It traces the imperial, military, economic, and political roots of the modern Japanese diet and then follows its export internationally. I love this book.
Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: a History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. I've only read an article on chocolate that later made its way into this book, but it was fabulous. Not only an eye-opening exploration of chocolate's pre-colonial and colonial history in the New World, but a wonderful treatment of its introduction in the Old World. Norton does a fabulous job of demonstrating the complexity and multi-directionality of colonialism here, and of defending the place of taste within that history.
Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. This is an absolute classic. Mintz is an anthropologist, and this is an anthropologist's history of the role of sugar and the taste for sweetness in a multi-century sweep of world history. Mintz does so much here. Such a must-read.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Tastes of Paradise: a Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. This book is fun and readable, but not super scholarly. There are plenty of big provocative claims that make you rethink the use of stimulants in Europe -- but some of those claims need a bit more research, I think.
Gewertz, Deborah, and Frederick Errington. Cheap Meat: Flap Food Nations in the Pacific Islands. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. And why not a Pacific-centered book? This is also written by anthropologists. It focuses on Papua New Guinea and New Zealand -- and Tonga a bit -- and explores the flap food trade in Oceania. Flaps are fatty portions of sheep that are extremely unhealthy and are variously seen as cast-off waste food, a symbol of neo-colonialism, and a route toward some version of "the good life." Great book -- even if it has more questions than answers.
Hope that helps. There are plenty more. Let me know if you're interested in something specific.
https://www.amazon.com/Sweetness-Power-Place-Modern-History/dp/0140092331
This was a great read for me about history of sugar (and capitalism). And it has a whole great section about popularization of tea in England. I see a potential in a trading or tycoon game about influencing Europe with crops from exotic lands in the 18th century. Coffee, Tea, Cocoa. It could work well, we should brainstorm about it :)
Regarding the association between women and sweet foods, I believe that's due to a cultural shift that happened during the 1800s. There's a book on the rise of sugar that might be worth checking out if you're interested: Sweetness and Power
>"Wives and children were systematically undernourished because of a culturally conventionalized stress upon adequate food for the ‘breadwinner’ [...] While the laboring husband got the meat, the wife and children got the sucrose.”
Regarding beer being associated with guys, that also seems to be cultural, although I don't know the origin of that. I spent some time in Japan and was taken aback by the amount of beer advertising aimed just at women-- not the sort of "hey girls, you can buy lite beer now, it has no carbs!!!" sort of ads we get here in Australia, but ads about middle-aged housewives enjoying beers after shopping, or business ladies knocking back a few after work. The same gender-equal approach to enjoying beer seems to go for Maori communities, too (based on my partner's family, at least), to the point of when his grandma passed away, the family poured out beer at her grave in a sort of offering.
It’s about this:
https://www.amazon.com/Sweetness-Power-Place-Modern-History/dp/0140092331/ref=nodl_