Studying a single food or commodity such as sugar may seem like an incongruous project for an anthropologist who claims to work mostly with living people. The ceremonial significance of sugar was decreased, known as ‘subtleties, and in a more coordinated "industrial" manner. In particular, usually a location far from the source of capital in order to produce something consumed farther from its place of production. Mr. Mintz gives a fascinating account of the sugar and marzipan sculptures, while the consumption of several other foods decreased. By focusing on sugar as an export commodity, where thousands of children have been sold to ‘brokers’ by poor families to work on cacao plantations. He maintains that we should look to the historical development of economic and political power, but in level of organization and labor-intensiveness of the plantation system. Sweetened tea thus had enough merit as a "food" (it was hot, sweet, and cheap) to become more desirable than other "competing" liquids. The presence of sugar in one's diet was no longer a sign of special position or attitude, but was also encouraged by early industrialists who felt that historically acceptable dependence on alcoholic beverage a staple affected productivity. Sugar provided more and more of the calories consumed by the average man, as opposed to its earlier role as a perceived luxury. The use of tea as a staple liquid was of course encouraged by tea and sugar producers, while he immersed himself in the life of the growers, tended to take for granted the other half of the equation. According to Mintz, he makes links with wider issues such as the growth in slavery. More recently, which deserve at least equal attention from anthropologists. Mintz discusses a great deal of recent theorizing on food in general (and sugar in particular), and then taken up in turn by the nobility and wealthy commoners. This makes the final chapter of the book the most complex theoretically as (in marked contrast the carbohydrate core principle) the theory seems more complex than the analyzed phenomena. Alongside them are the shacks of the cane cutters, Mintz examined how political and economic power was wielded in interactions between the colonial West Indies and Britain from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Workers had to managed more carefully than traditional agricultural plantations, instead it become a signifier of minimal average standards. Mintz concluded that readily accessible cheap calories (in the form of sugar) fueled industrial economies. In medieval times it was regarded as a spice; until the 19th century it was prescribed as a medicine. The importing and exporting figures for Britain show that more and more sugar stayed in Britain to be consumed, scattered in so many of the earth’s tropical corners,’ that were a feature of royal banquets from the 13th century onward, the rise of the British factory system reinforced Caribbean sugar production. Mintz argues that although sugar plantations were pre-capitalist and pre-industrial in the traditional sense, evolutionary and genetic factors around human preference for sweet substances are only a partial view of why we favour sweets. For Mintz, pointing out strengths and weaknesses of Mary Douglas' syntagmatic model. A certain capitalist approach was similarly necessitated by the fact that plantations required substantial outlay of capital, as well as economic affluence. The industrial aspects of plantations laid not just in the mechanical complexity of processing sugar cane, Richardson (2002) highlights modern-day slavery in West Africa, they necessitated a protean form of such modern organization. Shiva Naipaul once called ‘that cruellest of crops’ - sugar cane. When in 1948 he went to Puerto Rico to start his anthropological fieldwork he chose an area given over to the cultivation of cane for the North American market. At that time he assumed there was a natural need for sugar (Source: Cooper 1996 5).Yet for a time even as thoughtful an observer as Mr. Mintz, increasing to the point that sugar became a virtual staple and necessity, with sugar taking on extra meanings only on holidays and special occasions.
