Introduction

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Drew Faust for organizing the April 2007 Radcliffe Conference and in particular for organizing this panel. I would also like to thank Damian Mosley for his research assistance, and Brett Gary, Carole Counihan, Sidney Mintz, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Mintz, “Cuisines: Regional, National, Global?” Paper given at The History of Food and Drink, University of Adelaide, May 14–15, 1999.

2. “Symposium Review on Sweetness and Power,” Food and Foodways, vol. 2, no. 2 (1987), pp. 107–198.

3. William Roseberry, p. 134 of 1987 issue.

4. Daniel A. Baugh, p. 119 of 1987 issue.

5. Walter L. Goldfrank. 1987. Review of Sweetness and Power. Theory and Society 16(4): 640–641.

6. Ian Roxborough. 1986. Review of Sweetness and Power. Man, 21(3): 575.

7. John Gross, Review of Sweetness and Power by Sidney Mintz, New York Times, June 11, 1985, p. C15.

8. Mark Wilde. 1987. Review of Sweetness and Power. Technology and Culture 28(1): 141–143.

9. John A. Marino. 1987. Review of Sweetness and Power. Journal of Modern History 59(3): 551.

10. Wilde, 143.

11. As Mintz notes in his essay in this volume, one of the first such books to focus on a single commodity or food item was Redcliffe Salaman's The History and Social Influence of the Potato (1949). In the last two decades dozens of such books have been published including (in alphabetical order): Ken Albala. Beans: A History (Berg, 2007); Sophie Coe and Michael Coe, The True History of Chocolate (Thames and Hudson, 1996); Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Oxford, 2006; John T. Edge, several books including Donuts: An American Passion (Putnam Adult, 2006); Betty Fussell, The Story of Corn (Knopf, 1992); Virginia Jenkins, Bananas (Smithsonian Institution, 2000); Mark Kurlansky, several including Cod: A Biography of a Fish That Changed the World (Walker and Company, 1997); Pierre Lazlo, Citrus: A History (University of Chicago, 2007) and Salt: Grain of Life (Columbia University Press, 2001); Alan McFarlane and Iris McFarlane, An Empire of Tea (Overlook Press, 2004); Andrew Smith, several, including, The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture and Cookery (University of South Carolina, 1994); Jack Turner, Spice: The History of a Temptation (Vintage, 2005).

12. Jennifer Ruark, “A Place at the Table,” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 1999.

13. Apart from Sweetness and Power Mintz has contributed to and shaped the scholarly study of food in other ways including first, his skepticism over the notion of a “national cuisine,” especially when referring to an “American cuisine.” In his book Tasting Food Tasting Freedom and elsewhere, Mintz has argued that there are only regional cuisines tied to geographical locations and indigenous foods. This is still a rich and important debate in part stimulated by him. Second, important is Mintz's articulation of the “core-fringe-legume” non-Western meal pattern. See “Food Patterns in Agrarian Societies: The Core-Fringe-Legume Hypothesis,” by Sidney Mintz and Daniela Schlettwein-Gsell, Gastronomica, vol. 1, no. 3(Summer 2001): 40–52. Also significant are Mintz's musings on the parallels between Coca-Cola and tea. In an unpublished paper entitled “Quenching Homologus Thirsts,” (paper in author's possession) Mintz traces the history and finds parallels in their development and uses. Among other similarities, both emerged as drinks in societies (in different times, in different places) that were in the process of modernization, becoming industrial (England 1800s, Southern US, 1900s), which aligned people's meal schedules with factory work. Both he has referred to as “proletarian hunger killers.”