[Marxism] 'Sweetness and Power' by Sidney Mintz: Tea with sugar and Rum for industrial workers

[Greg McDonald]

....In Sweetness and Power, Sidney Mintz shows how capitalism has  
undermined the social quality of eating as well as the nutritional  
content of what we eat.  The diet of Scottish working people (who,  
until the mid-18th century were mainly agricultural workers), was  
based on porridge and milk.  When the workers were driven off the  
land, they switched to bread with butter and tea with sugar.  "The  
jute industry provided opportunities for female labour, so that many  
housewives went out to work in Dundee.  When the mother is at work  
there is not time to prepare porridge or broth..."

Mintz adds, "Sweetened preserves (more than 50% sugar), which could  
be left standing indefinitely without spoiling ;and without  
refrigeration, which were cheap and appealing to children, and which  
tasted better than more costly butter with store-purchased bread,  
outstripped or replaced porridge, much as tea had replaced milk and  
home-brewed beer.  In practice, the convenience foods freed the wage- 
earning wife from one or even two meal preparations per day,  
meanwhile providing large numbers of calories to all her family.  Hot  
tea (with sugar) often replaced hot meals for children off the job,  
as well as for adults on the job."  At the start of the 19th century,  
sugar accounted for 2 percent of the total calories in Scottish  
workers' diet.  By the end of the century it was more than 14 percent.

The trend continues worldwide, with simple carbohydrates (sucrose)  
replacing complex carbohydrate (starches) wherever workers have been  
driven off the land (everywhere). "Together with the sugar increases  
come remarkable increase in the consumption of fats," according to  
Mintz.  In the US the consumption of sugar as a proportion of  
carbohydrates has doubled in this century.  The total daily average  
per capita consumption of complex carbohydrates fell from about 350  
grams to about 180 grams between 1910 and 1970, while the consumption  
of fat increased by 25 percent.  With further increase in recent  
years, the typical American is now consuming three-quarters of a  
pound of fat and sugar per day.

The way we live now is characterized by "desocialized eating," says  
Mintz.  "Choices to be made about eating -- when, where, what, how  
much, how quickly -- are now made with less reference to fellow  
eaters, and within ranges predetermined, on the one hand, by food  
technology and, on the other, by what are perceived as time  
constraints.  The experience of time in modern society is often one  
of an insoluble shortage, and the perception may be essential to the  
smooth functioning of an economic system based on the principle of  
ever-expanding consumption." Mintz's brilliant
study provides data that debunks the myth of progress and the myth  
that capitalism promotes "family values."
-- Fred Gardner
     reprinted from the Anderson Valley Advertiser
               (POB 459,Boonville, CA 95415)