3/2/2023 0 Comments England sugar storySugar and slaves were both present in the colony by 1619. England founded its first American colony at Jamestown in 1607. This high status might have been preserved, but Columbus had taken canes with him on his second voyage to the New World. Sugar was then rare and exotic enough to be thought of as a spice or medicine. Queen Elizabeth's teeth are said to have been blackened by over-consumption. Mentions of sugar are hard to find in Chaucer but common enough in Shakespeare. Then Arab traders brought trickles of its crystals. Sugar cane was over the horizon, one of a family of grasses squeezed to produce a sweet liquid in New Guinea and India. Perhaps this comes with mother's milk or our primate ancestors' delight in ripe and more easily digested fruit - nobody can be sure - but in northern Europe a thousand years ago the appetite had only the rare treats of honey or fruit to satisfy it. What sugar did was awaken and then feed an appetite, the human tongue's predisposition for sweetness. In this way, sugar escaped moral censure until late in the 20th century, when doctors began to worry about the results of eating - or over- eating - a food so high in calories and low in nutrients, and, thanks to new techniques in food processing, omnipresent on supermarket shelves. Like tea, coffee, tobacco, chocolate and rum, it had physiological, consoling effects, particularly in children, but they were barely visible. But why was the white world so keen and ruthless to have it? Mintz calls it one of his tropical "drug foods", whose consumption rose rapidly among European populations from the 17th century. Some facts about sugar are well-known: it causes teeth to rot Europeans shipped slaves from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean to harvest the cane (13 million of them between 15). His book came out of a lifetime's work, beginning in 1948 when he went to live as a fieldwork student with the cane-cutters of Puerto Rico, and it tells the story of how a human appetite remade the world in a way that rivals (in Mintz's view, even surpasses) the more celebrated influences of the steam engine and the web. Some are good, other demonstrate the deficiencies of a bright idea, a £12,000 publishing advance, and three months spent in the British Library. There have since been histories of all kinds of unlikely things - cod, pineapples, nutmeg, typewriters - intended to demonstrate their social importance and aimed at non-specialist audiences. The titles of these books used to cause a smile, with their implications of eccentric and narrow scholarship, but after Mintz published his Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History, a new genre got under way. In popular publishing terms, nothing much happened after that until Henry Petroski's The Pencil: A History appeared in 1980. That distinction probably goes to Redcliffe N Salaman's The History and Social Influence of the Potato, published in 1949. It wasn't the first book to take an everyday plant, substance or object and show how it had changed civilisation. In 1985 he published a book that saw the modern history of the world, and particularly of Britain, through the prism of sugar. Mintz radiated a similar kind of comradeship with humanity, as befits a man who has spent 60 years studying it. He walked with a stick to the platform, spoke with a slight lisp and sometimes departed from his script - there was an interesting excursion into the origins of the Crow tribe - and the American he most reminded me of was the humorist Will Rogers, who said (at the prospect of meeting Trotsky) that he'd never met a man he didn't like. Sidney Mintz, 85, is a professor of anthropology at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University. On Thursday night, an elderly American professor stood in front of a large audience at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and told them about how the capsicum had reached China from its original habitat in South America.
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