30 pages • 1 hour read
Sidney W. MintzSweetness and Power
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1985A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “Consumption”
The author details the five major uses of sugar in England throughout history: medicine, spice, decoration, sweetening, and food preservation. Mintz discusses the multipurpose use of sugar and the difficulty of practically separating the often-overlapping uses from one another. He focuses on the changing meanings of sugar as patterns of consumption gradually changed for different classes of English society since the 14th century.
Sugar “entered slowly into European medical practice via Arab pharmacology” (80), and in England, there is written record of sugar’s medical use as early as the 13th century. Sugar-medicine was “widely established in Europe” (103) by the 16th century and was the subject of fierce debate as to its efficacy in the 17th and 18th centuries. Sugar’s medicinal use declined by the 19th century when “it was transformed into a sweetener and preservative on a mass basis” (107). As a spice, sugar was “prized among the wealthy and powerful of western Europe, at least from the Crusades onward” (80). Its decorative use in Europe began with the nobility, including the practice of serving symbolic “subtleties” (edible sugar sculptures) between courses at royal gatherings, and eventually, this use trickled down to the non-monarchal upper classes of society.
The popularity of sugar as a sweetener in English society grew with its incorporation as an ingredient in tea, coffee, and chocolate. Sugar mixed with these three consumables was already becoming widespread in the United Kingdom by the 17th century. Tea paired with sugar emerged as the most popular of these three partly because it “can be more successfully adulterated than either coffee or chocolate” (112) and because of England’s imperial protection of tea cultivation through the East India Company. By the 18th century, tea and sugar were both widespread and affordable, and in the 19th century, this pairing became an absolute daily necessity for most working-class people.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Sugar’s meaning for the English changed depending on who was using it, how it was being used, and at what point in history sugar was being eaten or admired.
Sugar arrived on the scene in England almost exclusively as a luxury of the wealthy and ruling classes from the 12th to the 16th centuries at a time when the general English diet “was still meager, even inadequate, for many if not most people” (77). Its symbolic meaning, in the form of decorative “subtleties” created for lavish royal dinners, is illustrative:
[T]o be able to provide one’s guests with attractive food, which also embodied in display the host’s wealth, power, and status, must have been a special pleasure for the sovereign. By eating these strange symbols of his power, his guests validated that power (90).
Eventually, the “aspiring upper classes” (93) adopted sugar’s status symbolism for their own dinner events at a time when sugar was still a rarity for the rest of the population.
Sugar’s symbolic power for the ruling and wealthy classes diminished “when sugar had become relatively cheaper and more plentiful, and its function as a marker of rank had descended to the middle classes” (94). This trickling down of sugar usage to more segments of the British populace was always accompanied by changing meanings and uses of the substance, including a “decline in the symbolic importance of sugar […] with the increase in its economic and dietary importance” (95).
The working classes’ mass adoption of sugar (especially as a tea accompaniment) changed sugar’s general use and meaning once again; first, as a staple food that brought comfort and stimulation to working Britons, and second, as a reason for interested parties to push for free trade reforms in the country: “So vital had sugar and tea become in the daily lives of the people that the maintenance of their supply had by then become a political, as well as an economic, matter” (116). English working-class consumption habits and colonial production were inextricably linked by 1850 when the majority of sugar consumers in England could be described as the working poor.
